UK Tier-4 Student Visa Applications Suspended in North India
The UK Border Agency announced today that all new applications for Tier-4 Student visa shall be suspended beginning February 1, 2010 because of unprecedented developments in the last quarter. According to their press release, the last quarter ending December 2009, the UKBA office in New Delhi received more than 13,000 applications as opposed to less than 2000 applications during the same period in the year 2008.
The affected regions are as follows:
- North India: New Delhi, Jalandhar and Chandigarh
- Bangladesh
- Nepal
The unexpected mountain of applications in itself may not be so intimidating but the UKBA office suspects serious issues behind this rise. The official reasons vary from fraud documentation to suspected human trafficking. The countdown to the September 2009 intake season saw very high UK Tier-4 Student visa rejections primarily due to stricter documentation criteria. Now for the January 2010 intake season, the officials suspect extremely high volumes of documentation fraud in preparation for the visa application.
Second cause for suspicion is that January intake is not a major season compared to September intake which is when most of the major Universities and private Institutes begin their curriculum. Some private colleges and Universities however do take students in January but not to the extent seen in rise in applications.
Thirdly they have not seen similar rise in the number of application from other countries to explain a general trend.
The UKBA office still remains partially mum and doesn’t want to pre-judge such issues unless they fully complete their internal investigations of all the applications and verify the documentation provided to them from all authentic sources.
I personally believe that changes in documentation criteria which went into affect last year in 2009 could partly be the reason. Under the new rules, a student could show sufficient funds in his/her bank accounts for only 28 days unlike earlier when the funds had to be in the bank for longer duration. It easier to manipulate the bank documents for 28 days only as opposed to 90 days or more. Secondly the downfall of Australia as a preferred destination for students left only UK and USA as alternatives. Since USA has its own share of economic and employment related issues, UK remains a reasonably viable choice.
Let’s wait to hear from the officials about the real reasons for the mind-boggling 6-fold increase in the applications.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!