Mumbai: Are you a frequent flier with a good track record who doesn’t overstay on foreign trips and has always managed to stay on the right side of the law? If so, here’s some good news. The next time you need to rush to the UK for an emergency, you could get a visitor’s visa a day after you apply for one for an additional fee of Rs 4,320.
The new fast-track facility will be offered at all 12 UK visa application centres across India. In Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, candidates can get a visa a day after they put in their application. In other parts of the country, they could get it two to four working days.
“This facility is for Indians who have previously travelled to the UK, the European Union, the US or Australia and have returned on time and followed all the immigration rules,’’ said Barbara Woodward, International Group Director, UK Border Agency.
The facility will initially be limited to 50 such visas issued per day across India. “We don’t want to take on more than we can deal with. We may look at increasing the numbers in future,’’ said Woodward.
The development is significant as the UK’s largest visa processing operations take place in India. Nearly 5 lakh UK visas were processed in India last year. Woodward pointed to the fact that Indians formed the largest ethnic minority in the UK, resulting in a large number of Indians traveling to Great Britain to meet their friends and relatives.
While around 1.5 lakh Indians were issued a UK visa in 2000, last year the figure jumped to nearly 3.8 lakh. Around 65% of those transferred to the UK within the same company were also from India. The UK has excluded intra-company transfers from its new global visa norms for economic migration, which set an annual limit for workers from countries other than the European Union who want to work in the UK.
“We saw a sudden spike in the number of student visa applications in 2009. While processing them, we found that many applications were for low-level courses, and candidates often produced forged documents with the help of unscrupulous agents. We have good reason to believe that they were applying to the UK for reasons other than education,’’ said Woodward.
This, in turn, has led to more stringent norms for processing student visas. The abuse of student visas may also have had an impact on the processing of general visas. “There may have been times when a genuine candidate was refused a visa, and missed out on attending a wedding in the family, or an important occasion,’’ said Woodward, who is trying to walk the tightrope between making visa applications hassle-free for genuine candidates while at the same time cracking down on fraudulent visas.
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