OCI saga over at last

Name
mjohn87
Country
United States

Finally, my OCI endeavor is over after 9 months. I applied in Jan 2011 and there were many people active in this forum (pre-travisa), but by August most of them got their OCIs and left. I was very frustrated being at the receiving end of the rod and at last started calling. Only good thing was someone from the consulate called me back every time. According to them, everything is A OK and will be granted that day. But that DAY never occurred and I found to my dismay that the application is stuck at the signing officer's desk. I have all papers except surrender certificate because I became US citizen 17 years ago and my Indian passport is lost. But I have birth and SSC certificates to prove my Indian origin (As per the requirements for OCI). Things became hot and frustrating as things were not going well even after 8 months. I contacted people randomly at the office and was dumbfounded by the lack of cohesion in their answers. I believe the functioning is very loose and like most things in India -- somehow working miraculously --.

Anyway after many many many disarrayed communication routines (by the way no emails are answered), my application was suddenly granted. I was so shocked to see that the NOT GRANTED label was replaced with the GRANTED on Oct 3 label at last. In few days the rest of the stuff happened normally. Again, no email came to notify the reciept of OCI in Houston. Instead of testing my luck again, I send just the passports(no other documents) to an agent in Houston area and he collected and send it back within a day. I lost the $20 I paid in advance to the consulate for mailing charges as well as the money paid to the agent.

I think my one and only mistake was the timing to apply before the Travisa days. While I am glad this is over, I wish the process was less cluttered and transparent. First of all, the issue of OCIs to the Travisa applicants who applied much later, was a friggin nasty move. Yet again they floundered and process reached an unjustifiable eight months or more. I am aware of at least one family who is still waiting and I advised them to start calling. This concludes my endless visits to this forum and the OCI status tracking page, leave alone the hundreds of hours spent in researching what to do next. I wish all OCI aspirants well in their odyssey.

For more details on this please click here OCI - Houston Tracker

Citizenship and Naturalization

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