Due to the increased flow of new India visa applicants day after day, visa to India concerned bodies have imposed fresh regulations to regulate and limit the flow of foreigners to the country. The India visa processing team is more ardent to scrutinize all documents as well as other related information and/or applicant’s history and background.
In the recent past, the British High Commission in India released a bold new rule that under the Indian visa issuance, People of Indian origin who also held other foreign lifelong stay permits must surrender their Indian visa cards to relevant authorities as soon as they acquired an Indian visa. This is meant to eliminate seekers with invalid Indian visa documents.
The Commission also explained that no Indian citizen will at any given time be allowed to hold two different lifelong permits. After an Indian citizen acquires a foreign citizenship, he/she is no allowed travel with, apply for or hold an India visa. Such is referred to an offence and is punishable under the Indian law. You can be jailed under a court ruling or be penalized; at times both options may apply.
The Indian constitution also requires that all other foreign applicants in possession of business, employment, travel, transit and other types of Indian visa permits, whether out of date or valid, relinquish their possession in favour of the presently sought permit to the India visa authorities. A certificate is issued in place of the given up India visa which serves as an evidence of surrender. The long term, OCI and PIO cases are not an exception in this case either.
The surrender certificate is processed within one week at a fee of 90 pounds. Well, processing may take a bit longer if there were complicated cases such as expiry, invalidity, spelling errors to mention a few.
To give back your current Indian visa for reasons of expiry or intention to apply for a new one, you can visit any Indian visa authority or Indian commissions in your country. You must present the Indian visa card and the certificate processing fee in person. You can carry with yourself other necessary documents such as national identification cards or passports in case of foreign citizenship, copies of the Indian visa and other testimonials.
All the India visa enactments above are not meant to discourage applicants from an attempt to attest the beauty of India, they are only put in place to ensure genuine scrutiny.
