NEW DELHI: Foreigners touring India no longer need to physically visit the office of the
Foreigners Registration Office or Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRO/FRRO) for visa-related services including registration and visa extension, which will now be offered online through the e-FRRO platform.
Union home minister
Rajnath Singh on Friday launched the web-based application ‘e-FRRO’, which will allow foreign tourists/travellers to avail of paperless and cashless visa-related services online while eliminating the need for any human interface.
In the new system, foreigners will be able to get as many as 27 visa and immigration-related services in India from the comfort of their place of stay. Using the e-FRRO application, foreigners can apply online on the portal and obtain the service(s) through email/post without appearing in person at the FRO/FRRO office.
While launching the e-FRRO service here, Singh said it had been a constant endeavour of the home ministry to provide fast and efficient services to foreigners visiting India so that they have a pleasant experience of their stay here.
Some of the salient features of the e-FRRO include online
FRRO Service delivery mechanism without requirement of visiting FRRO/FRO office barring exceptional cases. Using this application, foreigners are required to create their own User ID by registering themselves. Afterwards, they can apply online through registered user ID for various visa and immigration related services in India viz. registration, visa extension, visa conversion, exit permit etc.
e-FRRO is running successfully as a pilot project in four FRROs (Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai) since February 12, 2018. Now it has been rolled out in the remaining eight FRROs, - namely Kolkata, Amritsar, Hyderabad, Cochin, Thiruvananthapuram, Calicut, Lucknow and Ahmedabad.
In 2017, of the nearly 1 crore foreigners who visited India, nearly 3.6 lakh had to visit
FRRO offices across the country for various visa-related services.
The e-FRRO scheme has been implemented on the IVFRT platform with negligible extra expenditure, taking a cue from the already successfully running e-visa scheme that has earned revenue of more than Rs 1400 crore since its launch in November 2014.
A home ministry release on Friday said online services offered by E-FRRO scheme are not available even in some of the most advanced countries of
North America and Europe.