(Photo for representation.)
New Delhi: The United States embassy here in India’s capital, along with its consulates across the country, conducted an extraordinary initiative dubbed “Super Saturday”, last Saturday. This initiative saw the embassy welcome over 1,000 applicants for visitor visas. The US ambassador in India, Eric Garcetti, was present to lend a hand with the increased workload, particularly in the fingerprint verification stage in the embassy.
On this, Garcetti said, “The foundation of our US-India partnership is the network of relationships that individuals form when they work, travel, and study in the United States. We’re doing everything we can to facilitate the visa process and support critical people-to-people connections. The US mission in India has increased staffing and harnessed technological innovations to meet the unprecedented demand and process more visas than ever before.”
The year 2023 set a new benchmark with the US embassy and consulates in India issuing an astounding 1.4 million visas, marking a 60 per cent surge in applications from the previous year, as India Sentinels had reported earlier. Currently, Indian nationals constitute one in every 10 visa applicants to the US globally.
This month’s “Super Saturday” was the inaugural event of four such planned visa-processing days in 2024. Additionally, the US consulate in Mumbai also opened for extra visa-processing time on the same day.
