Britain to review student visa suspension by month-end

CHANDIGARH - The British high commission would decide by the end this month whether to start re-issuing student visas at its three applications centres in the northern India, an official said Monday.

“We will again review the situation by the end of this month. Then depending on our evaluation, we will decide when to resume accepting applications again,” said Nigel Casey, British deputy high commissioner, here.

A 10-time increase in the student visa applications forced the UK Border Agency to temporarily stop accepting applications at Chandigarh, Jalandhar and New Delhi for an indefinite period of time.

Charlie Molloy, regional manager of the UK Border Agency, said: “We have taken this decision in response to unexpectedly high numbers of student visa applications from this area at this time of the year. The temporary suspension will allow us to continue to scrutinize applications thoroughly.

“There was an unprecedented growth in the applications from this part during the period of three months, October to December, last year. We received 13,500 applications during this period in 2009, 1,800 in 2008 and only 1,200 in 2007,” Molloy said.

Now these centres would not accept student visa application under tier 4 of points-based system whereas people in other visa categories are unaffected by this development.

“We will make sure that those applicants, who have already paid the visa fees, will be given priority once we resume our operations here and there is no wastage of their money. This exercise is just to protect genuine students and education providers,” Casey said.

As per official records, Britain’s visa operation in India is its largest in the world.

Besides this, UK Border Agency is also taking measures to weed out substandard and unscrupulous educational institutes in their country.

“We regularly scrutinize the operations of educational institutes and they have to maintain certain standards prescribed to them. In the last few months, affiliations of nearly 100 institutes have been cancelled as their working was not found up to the mark,” said Casey.

Students and education consultants here are quite upset.

“I intended to apply for September session in a UK university for a management course. But now this move has put my future in dilemma,” said Sidhartha Sharma, an engineer working in a software company here.

Raghu Misra, a city-based overseas education consultant, said: “This decision of UK Border Agency is totally unwarranted. Many of our students have already paid hefty fees in various colleges and their appointment at visa application centre was scheduled in the coming days.”

“Now we fear that many students might lose lakhs of rupees as they (the high commission) have not involved educational institutions in the UK while taking this decision,” he said.