I tried recently to obtain Indian Visa for my family and encountered a nightmarish situation. The point is not to bash the system, but turn this into an opportunity to find innovative solution.

Background:
Indian consulate has outsourced its visa application process (good) to external service providers. Very recently, they decided to change their service providers! This created the following backlog that is hard to tame!

• The consulate and service provider stopped accepting/processing new applications starting around May 10th or so (with a view to going live on May 21) creating a backlog
• On May 21, the new service provider was overwhelmed (system is too slow or unable to work) and as of May 28th, the situation hasn't improved very much
• In addition, the consulate (probably) decided to not allow older provider to service or accept any other means of application processing

This results into anxious crowds wanting to know the status of their application, some sense of timelines, and assurance about the processing.

Instead of blaming people and bureaucracy (including late appliers or people with emergency family situations), this can be turned into a great PR story.

I wanted to suggest following types of solutions for consideration.

Potential Solutions:

1. Indian government website allows you to create full application (that is registered/accessible by the consulate), its just the tracking, verification, and logistics of applications that is done by the provider. Why not allow other providers (that have functioning) systems to process this?
2. The purpose of consulates is to facilitate social and business bonds. Why not allow people with Indian origin to get some kind of a limited time entry permit? This could be done even when landing in India (Many countries allow something like this)
1. This would be easy if you can produce proof of Indian descent through a canceled Indian Passport?
2. Allow for regular proof of identity (such as school leaving certificate from India, Indian birth certificate etc) 
3. Allow for people who have traveled on a previous Indian visa in the past (e.g. last 5 years)
3. The biggest concern that would be raised would be around perceived security threats. I think that those can be addressed through a variety of means (after all, the benefit of allowing diaspora to meet with family should outweigh the small security risk)
1. Get endorsements for visa through a mechanism of Social Networking (Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram etc)
2. Design a simple, short, and effective verification process when landing -- verify address of friends in India, their phone numbers, their pictures etc. Even ability to speak in one of the regional languages could be credible
3. Provide an alternative to apply with a FaceBook type of identity (that has been established at least for last year or two)
4. Clearly, the service provider and consulate can dedicate more staff -- but that may not alleviate the root cause.

I do not know if our family will be lucky with our circumstances, but here's a situation that can be made very positive. I root for a positive outcome!

What do you think!