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New Indian visa centre in Beijing

Beijing: Less than a week before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is scheduled to make his first official visit to China, the Indian Embassy in Beijing inaugurated a new Indian visa application centre on Monday. It will be run by a private company, VFS Global Services, a part of the Kuoni Travel Group’s India branch.

For the embassy the outsourcing of the receipt and delivery of visas to a private company was necessitated by the burgeoning demand for Indian visas in China. Speaking at the inauguration, the Indian Ambassador to China, Nirupama Rao, revealed that 51,473 visas were issued by the Beijing embassy in 2007. This was a sharp increase over the 36,150 visas issued the year earlier.

India and China in fact celebrated 2007 as a Year of Friendship through Tourism. Earlier in the year in August, the China National Tourism Administration opened its first office in India. An India Tourism office in Beijing is also expected to open its doors shortly. Bilateral trade between the neighbours has been rocketing in recent years and is expected to have crossed the $35 billion by the end of 2007.

Given both the growing economic and tourism engagement across the Himalayas Ms. Rao said she “expected an exponential increase in visa applications in the future.” Twelve new application centres will thus be set up in different cities across China over the next few months.

All will be run by VFS Global Services, a company that has been active in China for several years and currently provides visa outsourcing services to the U.K., Belgian, German and Italian Embassies in the mainland.

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