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Two days is all it would take to get a student visa to the US in the near future, a senior official in the US’ Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (BECA) said. “Currently it takes a month to process an application. We intend to bring it down to 10 days soon and then meet the international standard of two days,” BECA Deputy Assistant Secretary (academic programmes) Thomas Farrell said. He said the US embassy in India had decided to expedite work on all pending applications for educational visas. Higher education is an extremely important service industry in the US, contributing $13.6 billion from foreign students to the economy every year.
Farrell said the number of Indian students going to US had dropped in the past year due to competition faced by the US from other countries like UK and Australia and improved domestic higher education scenario.
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The US, for the first time in 57 years, wants the Indian government to fund scholars selected from the country for the prestigious Fulbright programme. It’s an indicator of India’s growing affluence that the US feels it no longer needs to fund the scholars.
“Circumstances were different when the programme began in 1950. Now India can afford to pay,” said Thomas Farrell, deputy assistant secretary of state for academic programmes.
The Fulbright programme is a bilateral scholar exchange exercise that has so far had 34 Nobel and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners among its ranks. Every year, about 120 scholars from India head to the US, while an equal number of Americans come to India through the
programme.
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