This Article First Appeared In the Times Of India On April 30, 2023
We are in 2023. We can transfer large sums of money on our phones, order any item from a shirt to a car, share our location, upload files, buy tickets, watch live matches, make videos all on our phone. And yet, despite all these cool technological advances, for Indians one process is still stuck in the 1980s — the process of applying for a tourist visa from western countries. The US, the UK and Europe (which grants the Schengen visa) are amongst the most popular travel destinations for affluent Indians. However, getting a visa is a tedious collation of endless paperwork — photocopies of redundant documents, passport photos set to specifications up to the nearest millimetre, a lot of money and a long, longwait while giving up your passport for weeks without any certainty that one will be granted a visa. For the US visa, interview wait times can go up to a year.