A total of 1.4 million visas have been processed by the United States Embassy and Consulates in India last year.
In addition, short visitor visa appointment wait times were also reduced by 75 percent in India last year, VisaGuide.World reports.
According to a Times of India report, more than 140,000 visas were granted to Indian students last year by the consular team. This was more than in any other country in the world, thus accounting for a new record for the third year in a row.
A total of 60 percent increase in applications was registered by the embassy last year, compared to 2022. According to the US embassy, Indians account for one out of every ten US visa applicants around the world.
Visitor visas (B1/B2) have rebounded to represent the second highest number of applications in the US Mission’s history – over 700,000. Process improvements and investments in staffing have brought the appointment wait time for visitor visas down from an average of 1,000 days to only 250 days around the country.
The embassy said that process improvements and investment in staffing have brought the appointment wait time for visitor visas down from an average of 1,000 days to just 250 days around the country. The embassy emphasized that wait times are minimal in all other categories.
Mumbai, New Delhi, and Chennai are the top four student visa processing posts in the world, according to the embassy.
The US embassy has said that students from India have become the largest group of international graduate students in the US, accounting for more than a quarter of over one million international students studying in the US.
However, for Indians, employment visas remain a top priority, prompting the consular team in India to consolidate most petition-based visa processing in Chennai and Hyderabad in order to increase efficiency, leading to the processing of more than 380,000 visas.
According to the embassy, the consulate general in Mumbai also abolished a queue of more than 31,000 immigrant visa cases that were delayed as a result of the restrictions introduced due to the spread of the Coronavirus and its new variants.
The US Mission introduced new strategies as part of efforts to further increase efficiency, among them permitting more people to skip interviews for visas and utilising remote work in order to permit a larger number of staff around the world to contribute to Indian visa processing.
The US Embassy and Consulates have intensified their efforts to modernize operations by checking out new technologies and upgrading their facilities, like the new Consulate building in Hyberdabad.