Indian business and leisure travellers hoping to visit the United States face another round of frustration as the latest U.S. State Department figures show B-1/B-2 visitor-visa interview waits once again approaching, or exceeding, 12 months at several consular posts. Data released on 17 September and reviewed on 27 September indicate that the next available interview in Hyderabad now stands at a full year, while Mumbai is only marginally better at 11½ months. New Delhi shows a 10-month horizon and Chennai just over seven months. These numbers matter because India is by far the largest source market for U.S. visitor visas: nearly 1.4 million Indians travelled to the United States in 2025, and pre-pandemic traffic from India was growing at double-digit rates. Long queues are therefore a direct drag on consulting, IT-services and pharmaceutical firms whose executives shuttle frequently between the two countries, as well as on trade-show and MICE (meetings-incentive-conferences-exhibitions) traffic that underpins bilateral commerce. Although the State Department stresses that the published figures are estimates and that new slots are released regularly, mobility managers say unpredictability has become the bigger problem. “We can cope with eight or ten months if that timeframe is reliable; what hurts is booking travel and then learning an appointment has slipped or that an employee cannot qualify for an interview-waiver,” says Priya Balakrishnan, mobility lead at a Bengaluru-based semiconductor design firm. HR teams are increasingly booking backup appointments at alternative posts, monitoring the scheduling portal daily and using third-party services to capture cancelled slots—strategies that add cost and administrative burden. The silver lining lies in other visa classes: student (F/M) and exchange-visitor (J) categories show waits of less than three months across all Indian posts, and petition-based work visas (H/L/O) range from six weeks in Chennai to roughly five months in Hyderabad. Consular officers have also indicated that a new remote-processing pilot for certain renewals—currently available only inside the United States—could be rolled out to India in the next fiscal year if legal challenges to the programme are resolved. For now, companies are advised to build at least a 12-month lead time into U.S. visitor-visa planning, keep employees’ travel histories clean to maximise eligibility for interview waivers, and consider routing urgent travel through third-country consulates such as Singapore or Bangkok, where waits are typically shorter. Those measures, mobility experts say, may be the only practical hedge until Washington clears its pandemic-era staffing backlog or introduces broader digital processing reforms.
Source: The Times of India
