The visa saga

Part of the preparation for a trip to India is obtaining a visa. Since we don't live close to an Indian consulate, the process includes a third-party company that presents our passports to the consulate.

This really shouldn't be a traumatic experience. Last year we went through the same process to obtain a Russian visa (with a different third-party company). The application was long and sending our passports away by mail was unpleasant, but at least the process proceeded as advertised.

Not so for India.

First you visit the web site of the outsourcing company. Then you visit a web site run by the Indian government. Then you return to the first site, fill in more information, and print an application form.

After affixing a regulation picture to the printed application [no smiling!] and signing it twice, you have to scan the application. You upload this scan to the web site and manipulate it to extract the picture and the signature. This is emailed to the site, along with the original file for the picture.

Then you assemble a big pile of paper, including the application, passport, a money order, and some other stuff. You put all this in a FedEx envelope, paste the shipping bill (that you printed from the web site) on the front, and tape a bar code (which you also printed) on the back. Oh, and don't forget to buy a return FedEx envelope for them to use when they return your passports. Heaven forbid that your fee include return of your passports.

Multiply this by four if you have four passports, which we did. Stuff it all in the FedEx envelope. Begin prayers.

First problem: One of the required documents was proof of address. One of our driver's licenses was in the process of being renewed, so the corner was cut. (They cut off the corner of the still-valid license when they send in the renewal application; no, I don't know why.) What I should have done was Photoshop out the cut in the scanned image, but instead we decided to use a vehicle registration renewal to prove address. Nope. In spite of the list of acceptable documents, apparently the only really-acceptable one is "driver's license". So we had to send an image of our licenses.

Except that the person on the other end decided that the file was not attached "properly". It took another try before they decided that they could accept the image. "We can see it but we cannot print it." OK. Whatever.

Then we receive "everything is done" email status for three of the four applications. Apparently they did three and decided it was time to quit for the week. After the weekend, we received the "complete" status for the last of the four. (Remember, they went in one envelope, and were coming back in one envelope.)

But then nothing happened. After the web site had indicated that mailing was imminent for a week but FedEx hadn't received the package, I sent an email to their contact address. A day later I received a response - sorry for the inconvenience, your order is in the mail. And sure enough, a day later a FedEx package arrived.

. . . which conained one passport - the one that was separated from the others.

Another email inquiry [bold red text on the web site warns to use email, not telephone] nudges the other three passports towards FedEx. They arrived today.

I hope our experience is not typical. If it is, this company is spending all their potential profit on handling exceptions.