Reduce long visa wait time in India: Indian travel industry to the US

Long visa wait times and a lack of direct flight options were listed as the main challenges to travel between India and the US at a tourism and hospitality summit of the two countries organised on Friday.

Although the wait time for US visitor visa appointments in India has decreased from a peak of 999 days at the end of 2021, it still exceeds a year.

The US Department of State website Friday showed wait times for B1/B2 visa interview at 459 days in Chennai; 450 in Mumbai; 407 in Hyderabad; 381 in Kolkata and 379 in Delhi.

The travel industry urged the US to bring this down further.

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Travel between the two countries is indeed increasing rapidly, but it could grow even more if it weren’t for the dual challenges of long wait times and a lack of direct flights.

Union Tourism Ministry additional secretary Suman Billa said, “Even though the (traveller) numbers are good, we really have not capitalised on the potential that we have from a tourism (between India and US) perspective. Given the way pace at which Indian economy is growing, outbound tourism from here will only increase.”He also called for simplifying the US visa process, which though issued for 10 years, is “cumbersome and tiresome.”Jonathan M Heimer, US embassy’s minister counsellor for commercial affairs, said the pace of visa application processing has picked up leading to the issuance of a record number of visas.

“On the backend for the application processing, we’ve been able to process something like 60% more visas with more or less the same resources. And also we have issued more than 11 lakh visas in the last year, which for us, is a record and that’s just going to continue to go up that number,” Heimer said.

Western airlines, including American carriers, are not overflying Russian airspace since the Ukraine war. Due to this the India routes for nonstops by them have become longer. As a result, United and American have only a daily flight between Delhi and New York.

Air India, which overflies Russia, is the largest operator of nonstops between India and the US with 51 weekly direct flights between destinations like New York, Newark, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. While no one knows when Russian airspace will be used by western airlines, AI is going to Los Angeles and Dallas to its network this winter.
(With TOI inputs)