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September 21, 2005
U.S. Embassy Announces New Systems For Visa Applicants
India Press Releases
U.S. Embassy Announces New Systems For Visa Applicants
VFS and Bank Of America (Working With HDFC Bank) to Provide Visa and Fee Collection Services
September 20, 2005
NEW DELHI -- The U.S. Embassy and U.S. Consulates General in Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta are pleased to announce a new agreement with VFS to provide visa applicants throughout India with information, appointments, and courier services. VFS, which is currently offering a similar service for the Mumbai consular district, will become the sole provider of visa services to all applicants for U.S. visas in India as of October 3.
The decision to expand our relationship with VFS was based on the cost savings they are offering to our visa customers. The new cost for U.S. visa related services in India will decrease to Rs 276 (including taxes) per applicant for appointments booked starting October 3, for on-line or phone-in information, assistance with making appointments, and for the return by courier of passports with new visas.
It is important for all visa applicants to note that the new visa service system will still require each applicant to pay the standard non-immigrant visa application fee of $100 (Rs 4,400 at the current exchange rate) BEFORE booking an appointment. The visa application fee is non-refundable and may not be transferred to any other visa applicant, except with special permission from the Embassy.
To facilitate this program, the Embassy has expanded its existing relationship with Bank of America, which will collect the fee at a number of locations throughout India through its partner bank, HDFC Bank. The visa application fee, which must be paid before making an appointment, may only be paid at a designated branch of HDFC Bank. A list of the HDFC Bank branches authorized to accept the visa application fee is attached. Other branches of HDFC Bank will not be able to accept the payment. The designated HDFC Bank branches will begin accepting payments as of October 3, 2005.
Under the new system, applicants will be asked to complete their visa forms online using an interactive website that assists applicants in avoiding errors in data entry. Applicants with confirmed appointment will also get a PIN number giving them access to 10 minutes of “free-talk time” by calling a national toll-free number. This talk time can be used to inquire about rules and regulations, and also to track return passport delivery. For the time being, the toll-free number is accessible from MTNL and BSNL lines only.
Applicants will also have greater access to over-the-counter information and assistance at more locations. U.S. Visa Application Centers are being opened at new locations in Punjab at Jalandhar and Chandigarh, in Andhra Pradesh at Vijaywada, and in Kerala at Cochin. (See attached list of service centers)
The new visa service system, which incorporates the pre-payment of the non-refundable, non-transferable visa application fee, is expected to decrease the time visa applicants must wait for an interview by encouraging only those applicants who will actually appear for an interview to make an appointment.
It is important to emphasize that applicants who already have appointments scheduled through T.T. Services (TTS) in New Delhi, Chennai, and Calcutta or VFS in Mumbai will not be impacted by these changes. Appointments can continue to be made through TTS through September 30. All appointments made through TTS and under the old VFS system through September 30 will be honored. The visa application fees for appointments made with TTS should still be paid through a bank draft, as is the current practice.
TTS customers will soon be asked to reconfirm their appointments. As this reconfirmation process progresses, we anticipate most TTS appointment holders will be able to move their appointment times forward, although it may be several weeks before earlier appointments become widely available. The Embassy wishes to commend TTS for the high standard of service provided to visa applicants during its long association with the Embassy and Consulates’ General.
For more information about Visas to the United States, or to make an appointment for a Visa using the new VFS system, please visit one of the following links:
U.S. Embassy and Consulates
http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/
http://calcutta.usconsulate.gov/
http://chennai.usconsulate.gov/
http://mumbai.usconsulate.gov/
VFS
http://www.vfs-usa.co.in/ (active October 1, 2005)
Posted by bpatil at 07:35 AM | Comments (157)
September 15, 2005
Still Eating Our Lunch (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN)
September 16, 2005
Still Eating Our Lunch
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Singapore
Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of online war games.
Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us.
Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.
As Low-Sim Ay Nar, principal of Xinmin Secondary School, explained to me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold. No one is going to outdrill her students. What it is now focusing on is how to develop more of America's strength: getting Singaporean students and teachers to be more innovative and creative. "Numerical skills are very important," she told me, but "I am now also encouraging my students to be creative - and empowering my teachers. ... We have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas."
She added, "We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content" on the principle that "knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn't just have to come from the teacher."
Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai, India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University.
With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math, wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That's HeyMath.
"No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the world are worried that their kids might be missing something," Mrs. Sankaran said. "For some it is the right rigor, for some it is creativity. There is no perfect system. ... What we have tried to do is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices for teaching math concepts. So a teacher might say: 'I have a problem teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in India or Shanghai?' "
Singaporean math textbooks are very good. My daughter's school already uses them in Maryland. But they are static and not illustrated or animated. "Our lessons contain animated visuals that remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a 'hands on' manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant," Mrs. Sankaran said.
HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google - to establish a Web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the "best teacher in the world" for every math concept and to also be able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.
The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath (see www.heymath.net), which has been adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on homework.
Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today's world, and American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.
Posted by bpatil at 10:20 PM | Comments (64)