US outreach to India business to prevent visa abuse

"There's an awful lot of outreach with the business community in India. We have a very good relationship with NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) and other business groups there," Janice Jacobs, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs told reporters Thursday.

"So we are very interested in strengthening the economic partnership that we have with India, and I think these visas are part of that," he said.

However, US consulates or the Embassy in India had become aware of certain abuses of those two categories of visas, and they are taking measures to make sure that those abuses do not continue, Jacobs said when asked about reports that US missions were denying visas to some people whose visas had been approved in the US.

Noting that over 50 percent of the H&L visas for professionals issued by US worldwide are issued in India and these "two programmes, I think, have really benefited Indian nationals over the years," he said: "we don't want people who might try to abuse the system to spoil it for everyone else."

"So we do a lot of presentations and outreach on trying to explain what the procedures are, what the requirements are, just to make sure that everyone is sort of playing by the book so that we're able to issue visas to qualified applicants," Jacobs said.