April of 2014 turned out to be a visa application month for me. First I had to get my mother’s US visa renewed, followed by application for my and Rikti’s OCI Card (Overseas Citizen of India), then my parents Canadian visa and topping it all up with renewing Tarana’s US passport. These visa applications require so much paperwork and documentary evidence, that I wish there was a better way to digitize and automate the whole process. When travel industry has been able to develop sophisticated global systems to efficiently manage thousands of domestic and international flight bookings using GDSs and such, why can’t governments move data about passports, visas, identities and travel histories to a secure cloud? I hopefully predict we are a quarter of a century away from seamless international travel from a visa perspective, when I could log on to a global visa website, select the countries I wish to visit and for what purpose, and get issued the visas electronically.
In terms of today’s standards – since I recently had experience of dealing with consulates of three countries (USA, Canada, India) via their consular websites and/or appointed companies for visa processing – I would rate Canadian visa process 9/10, followed by US at 8/10. India unfortunately and expectedly needs to do a lot to clean up its visa game and I would only rate the experience at 3/10. It’s BLS, the appointed agency, causing most of the confusion and user-unfriendliness but at the end of the day, they have been appointed by the Indian government. What could BLS be an acronym for, by the way?