New Delhi: Underlining the burgeoning India-US relationship, the US mission has issued over 490,000 non-immigrant visas to Indian tourists, students and businessmen in the last year, an increase of 4.3 percent from the last US financial year.
According to a US embassy statement, the US mission and its consulates in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata have expanded their operations to cope with an ever increasing deluge of applications.
The US mission has also invested more than $100 million in updating and expanding its consular facilities.
To make it easier for Indians to get visas, the US mission has taken a slew of initiatives that includes increasing the consular staffing by 60 percent in the past five years. The applicants can now choose to have their visa interview in languages like Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Tamil and Telugu. (IANS)
