New Delhi: The wait times for US visas are expected to move towards further normalcy by mid-2023 though some progress has already been made through changes in rules and the opening of 100,000 slots for H and L work visas, a senior US embassy official said.
After issuing 82,000 student visas for India this year, the priority now is reducing the wait times for non-immigrant work visas such as the H and L categories, including the coveted H-1B visas, B-1 business visa, B-2 tourism visa, and visas for crews of shipping companies and airlines.
The US will initially focus “aggressively” on applicants in these categories using the “drop box” facility, or those who already were issued a US visa and are exempted from interviews, before taking up the case of first-time applicants. The effort, the official said, will be on reducing the wait times as much as possible and moving towards greater normalcy by June-July 2023.
Priority will also be given to H-1B visa holders in the US who want to visit India for family reunions, and then the focus will shift to first-time applicants.
The onboarding, training and deployment of the staff overseas will take some more time because “government bounces back slower” and staffing in India is expected to be at 100% by summer 2023, the official said. The US is also resorting to steps such as using temporary workers and sending Indian applications to remote locations for processing, especially for those using the drop box facility.
“Opening the 100,000 additional slots for H and L visas cut the wait time, which was more than a year earlier, to about half. The wait time for those using the drop box for B-1 and B-2 visas continues to be several months. We will see progress over the next nine months,” the official said.
Though the US state department’s website for visa appointment wait times shows first-time applicants in New Delhi for B-1 and B-2 visas face a wait time of 925 days, the official indicated that the actual time would be less.
The US side expects applications for all types of visas in India to increase to about 100,000 a month – or about 1.2 million annually – by 2023, making the country the second largest for visa operations after China. “But we are seeing signs of progress. The daily cases being handled are higher than the number of people applying by several hundreds,” the official said. (Hindustan Times)
