November 2, 2006

I would like to thank you all for coming out today to our press conference to discuss the efforts that we are making here at the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata to address the issue of visa backlogs and improvements to visa services.

In October Ambassador Mulford made a clear statement about the importance of visa services when he said:

“Relations between the United States and India have never been better.  In fact, our people have been establishing business and people-to-people contacts in far greater numbers than anyone ever predicted.  There has been enormous growth in the movement of people between our two countries, and the U.S. Mission is making it a priority to make this process easier.” 

The growing number of Indians seeking to travel to the U.S. had put a significant strain on the U.S. Mission in India.  However, as Ambassador Mulford noted, we are responding to this challenge and have been increasing our staffing and are planning to upgrade our facilities.

In fact, we now have two officers here on temporary assignment to provide more appointment opportunities for prospective visa applicants.  And, by the end of this week, we are adding new officer position to increase our permanent consular staff to three full-time officers managing our visa workload.

So, what does this mean to you and the public in East India?

At this time we have available appointments that are going unfilled.  Effectively, a person seeking an appointment within the week can now go on-line and obtain an interview time through the VFS website.

Therefore, I would encourage anyone who has a later appointment to consider moving their appointment time up to take advantage of these newly available slots. 

I also wanted to take the opportunity to introduce some new members of our Consulate team.  Rebecca Dodds is our new Vice Consul, who arrived this summer, and will provide more details about our recent consular initiatives. 

And I would like to also introduce Public Affairs Officer Douglas Kelly.  Doug arrived only last week and as you can see with today’s event he has really hit the ground running with this press conference.  Thank you Doug to you and your public affairs officers in putting this event together.

I’ll now hand the mike to Rebecca for her remarks.