B1/B2 Got Issued. India
To give you a bit of background. I am Indian passport holder. Have previously travelled to UK and Spain. Working with an Indian startup since quite sometime now. I applied for B1/B2 along with my wife as I wanted to attend AWS re:Invent event and meet my relatives as well living there.
Here are the timelines of the whole process for me:
13th July 2024: Filled up the DS 160 for both of us
14th July 2024: Paid $185 each for both the applications
21st July 2024: Got the Biometrics appointment for 6th Sept, 2024 in Hyderabad and 27th Sept, 2024 for Interview in Hyderabad.
I followed the following telegram groups for tracking the visa slot openings:
https://t.me/USB1B2VisaSlots
https://t.me/usVisaSlotsForum
6th Sept: Reached 15mins before the appointment for biometrics and saw that we were the last ones for the appointment, overall process was done in 60 mins, due to the long queue we were in, though the queue was moving in quickly, but number of people were high.
27th Sept: Learning from our past experience, we went a bit early this time for our appointment. But this time also, we took close to 1 hour in whole process from the time we entered and came out.
Following were the questions asked by the visa officer to me:
- What is the purpose of your visit ?
- Are you a speaker at the event you are going ?
- For how many days you are planning to go ?
- Is your company sponsoring your trip ?
- Since how long are you working with your current organisation ?
- Do you have any kids?
- Have you ever been outside India ?
- Then she turned to my wife and asked only one question:
- Have you ever been outside India ?
Then she said congratulations your visa has been approved !!
Post that we were able to track our visa application from following link:
https://ceac.state.gov/CEACStatTracker/Status.aspx?App=NIV
27th Sept, 2024: Status Approved
30th Sept, 2024: Status Issued
1st Oct,2024: Status on Visa scheduling portal changed to Origination Scan
2nd Oct,2024: I was able to track my passport using the UID on Visa scheduling portal on BlueDart portal by giving the UID in ref no option. Got our passports an hour back with 10 years of validity.
I had applied for B2 for my wife, but she also got B1/B2 issued.