A five-year extension of the Immigration Visa Foreigners Registration Tracking Scheme (IVFRT) has been approved by the center beyond 31 March 2021. The scheme, with a financial outlay of Rs 1,364.88 crore, will now be operational for another six years, according to today’s announcement. According to the statement, ‘the continuation of the scheme shows the Modi Government’s commitment to the core objective of IVFRT, which is modernizing and upgrading Immigration and Visa services’.
Specifically, it noted that the Ministry of Home Affairs, under the guidance of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, aims to provide a secure, integrated service delivery framework that facilitates legitimate travelers while enhancing national security.
By interconnecting and optimizing functions relating to immigration, visa issuance, registration of foreigners, and tracking of their movements in India, the project will cover 192 Indian Missions across the globe, 108 Immigration Check Posts (ICPs) in India, 12 Foreigners Regional Registration Officers (FRROs) and offices, and more than 700 Foreigners Registration Officers (FROs), Superintendents of Police (SPs) and Deputy Commissioners of Police (DCPs) across the country.
In the years following the introduction of IVFRT, the number of Visa and OCI cards issued increased from 44.43 lakh in 2014 to 64.59 lakh in 2019 at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.7 percent. An average visa processing time of 15 to 30 days (during the pre-IVFRT period) has been reduced to 72 hours for e-visas, with 95 percent of e-visas being issued within 24 hours. From 3.71 crores to 7.5 crores, international traffic has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 7.2 percent during the past decade.
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