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The US visa process will be temporarily suspended for three days in India as the US Embassy in India announced an update for all visa applicants in the country. The visa service will remain closed from July 12 to July 14 and resume back on July 15 after the technical revamp.
The Embassy in a communication stated that its visa service partner VFS Global is migrating to a new platform, which will result in the unavailability of appointment booking and visa fee payments for a period of three days. The Embassy has also shared details on the new email address to reach the VFS Global customer service center.
“Attention visa applicants! Our customer service center VFS is migrating to a new platform and will be temporarily closed for calls, fee payments, and appointment booking from July 12-14. These services will resume on July 15. For more information, please visit https://ustraveldocs.com,” the US Embassy said in a tweet.
Effective July 15, US Embassy in India is moving to a new system for US visa service. Therefore, the Embassy has advised all applicants to ensure that all the data entered in their profile is complete and correct. It also asked the applicants, who have already paid their visa fee but not associated it to their profile, to ensure entering the payment receipt number into their profile. “If you are a travel coordinator, group coordinator, or family, and you added dependent visa applicants to primary applicant profiles, please ensure that each dependent/applicant has a unique email address. This may mean changing the email address you currently have listed for them. Please contact our call center if you need help updating this information,” the Embassy further added.
Last month, the US Department of State had decided to increase visa fee for non-immigrant applicants. The fee increase effective June 17 led to hike in application fee for visitor visas for business or tourism (B1/B2s), and other non-petition based NIVs, such as student and exchange visitor visas to USD 185 from USD 160.
The application fee for certain petition-based nonimmigrant visas for temporary workers (H, L, O, P, Q, and R categories) was increased from USD 190 to USD 205.
This year, the Schengen area has rejected more than 121,000 visa applications from India, with a rejection rate of 18%. Algerian nationals were the ones with the most visa rejections, followed by applicants from Turkey, Morocco, and Russia. Tunisia and the UAE were also among the top ten countries with the highest rate of rejection.
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