Most of the people residing in India aim to go abroad either for education or for work. This year 60, 258 citizens of India applied to go to Canada.
Out of these Indians, the majority of applicants are from Punjab. Just after completing higher education, students apply to go to other countries in order to lead a better life.
After the pandemic, India saw a lot of rejection of Visas of their students from other countries. This time Canada rejected around 41% of Visas. This percentage has surprisingly increased as before the pandemic only 15-20 % of visas used to get rejected for some specific reasons.
The question that arises is: Why the visas are getting rejected? Why is it taking so long to get approval?
TrueScoop spoke to the immigration offices in this regard and this is what they have to say. The names have not been mentioned or have been changed as the sources wanted to maintain their anonymity.
The owner of an immigration office in Jalandhar said, “the main reason for a delay in Visas is that more than 20 lakh applications are still pending at the high commission. Another reason is that for the time being most of countries are prioritizing the people displaced because of the Ukraine-Russia war. More priority is being given to them as compared to other applicants. Due to this the processing time has also been increased to 3 months whereas earlier it was just one month.”
Another person having an immigration office in Ludhiana said that there are certain admission requirements of the universities situated abroad. As some of the students are not able to fulfil those requirements, in order to get the approval they get fake documents made from several agents. This time 2500 cases in Canada and 600 cases in Australia came to the fore of fake document submission. He also informed that some universities have a specified percentage to get admission and others require a minimum ITR of Rs. 9-10 lakhs per annum in order to give admission to the students.
The owner of a well-renowned immigration office in Jalandhar revealed that now the higher commission has started using Artificial Intelligence and also, they get the information verified digitally due to which the cases of the fake documents are coming forward in more numbers and visas of those are getting rejected.
The team of TrueScoop reached out to the students who have applied to go overseas and this is their point of view in regard to delay and rejection of visas.
Aman Singh from Chandigarh said, “my visa is taking a lot of time to get approved although all the documents that I have submitted fulfil the requirement. Earlier the approval used to come in a month and now it’s been more than 3 months that I have no clarity about my Visa.”
Another student who wishes to maintain her anonymity said that her visa got rejected even after submitting all the required documents. She also said that according to her the application got rejected due to already pending files.
Agamjot of Ludhiana said, “we got to know that the countries are prioritizing the people displaced from Ukraine. What is our fault for that? Our visas are getting rejected and delayed because priority is the war-affected students.”
From all the statements it is clear that many genuine cases are suffering to get approval as the countries are giving priority to war-affected students for time being. Another startling reason that has come across is due to the submission of fake documents by some of the students, the higher commission has got strict with all the students. Steps should be taken in order to eliminate this problem totally.