LETTER Dear Aman ki Asha...
Asalam-o-Alaikum
I had a chance to browse through your website www.amankiasha.com a few days back. I felt great to know that you are trying to bring together the people of Pakistan and India so that love and friendship can develop between the people of both countries and they can live happily in a peaceful environment, allowing our region of South Asia to progress.

We appreciate your struggles and pray that you may succeed in your efforts. We are all with you.

The divided families of India and Pakistan are facing a lot of difficulties in obtaining visas. Most of the people are unable to get visas as the procedure is very complicated. Besides that time and money is also wasted.

A relative of ours lives in Ajmer Sharif and is very sick. We planned to visit him during his lifetime as there's no guarantee of life. We started inquiring about the visa process and realised how very complicated it is. It requires an affidavit, bills of electricity and gas from India along with election card and ration card. We obtained originals of all these documents from India, filled the forms, and travelled to Islamabad to submit them.

After being in line for a long time, when our turn came, the officer objected that the affidavit was not attested and there are no attested signatures, and that the other documents - electricity and gas bills - were also not attested. We had the original bills with us. The website of India's embassy does not state that original documents should also be attested.

In the same way, the officers rejected the forms of other people on minor issues and we saw them also turning back hopelessly. Most of them had come from Karachi and Hyderabad.

We request you to write to the ambassador of India to adopt an easy process in place of the difficult one, and not to reject forms on the basis of simple mistakes. Furthermore, notifications or procedures should be written in Urdu so that people who understand only Urdu can get benefit from it, as lot money and time is wasted because of small mistakes. Plus such information should also be provided on Aman ki Asha and a filled form should be uploaded on the website as a sample so that people can fill their form by looking at it.

Along with that, it would be useful if you obtained information about the mistakes that people commonly make and the objections that are raised on incorrect forms and add this information to the website.

We pray that you succeed in your efforts.



Irshad Ali, North Karachi

Thursday, July 22, 2010

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