Punjab police coordinating with visa officials to control rush

JALANDHAR - Police in Punjab are coordinating with the officials of the British Visa Facilitation Service (VFS) centre to control the heavy rush that they expect Wednesday, as aspirants for a student visa try to beat the Oct 1 deadline when new and stricter guidelines come into effect.

Sanjiv Kalra, Inspector Generol of Police (Jalandhar range), told IANS here Tuesday evening: “We are taking today’s (Tuesday) incident very seriously. We cannot allow things to go out of our hand. We are talking with the VFS officials in order to control heavy rush tomorrow (Wednesday).”

Police, who were called out to control hundreds of visa applicants and relatives accompanying them, had to cane charge and push away the applicants away several times to control entry into the VFS centre in this Punjab city Tuesday.

Many applicants, including girls, fainted during all this action.

Scores of applicants had queued up outside the centre since Monday morning even though the centre opened Tuesday morning only. Several queues, extending to nearly 500 metres, were seen despite the sweltering heat.

“We have been standing here since yesterday (Monday) morning. There are no arrangements. Everything is in a chaos,” a female applicant said.

With no arrangements being made by the VFS centre management and British high commission to make things orderly, the district authorities and police had to chip in, a police official said.