Just what is the United Kingdom doing to streamline the process of issuing visas to Pakistani applicants? Hardly anything it would seem. The United Kingdom Border Agency, which was established in 2008 and took over responsibility for visa services, suffered great embarrassment last year when its ‘hub and spoke’ model resulted in a massive visa application logjam at Islamabad’s British High Commission.

Applicants’ passports were to be sent to the UKBA ‘regional hub’ in Abu Dhabi for processing but confusion over the various permissions required to transfer large consignments of passports resulted in delays; concurrently, the high commission reported the loss of several passports. Now, it seems that over 3,000 Pakistani travel documents may have gone missing at some point. Can we ask the British authorities to speed up the rescue effort and recover the travel documents? At the same time, they need to work on a system that is efficient and reliable and does not cause undue anxiety to visa applicants, who should be informed one way or the other about the status of their visa within the stipulated time.

No doubt the high commission has valid security concerns but perhaps it should also factor in the concerns of thousands of Pakistan visa applicants, some of whom have travelled extensively to the UK without encountering any hitch. If the high commission cannot go back to the relatively hassle-free process of issuing visas within Pakistan — although it must be pointed out that other equally vulnerable foreign missions in Islamabad are processing visas in the capital — then it must ensure that the now circuitous route to the Gulf is made simpler, possibly through an efficient tracking system, so that applicants know at each stage where their passport is. After all, many of them have set travel plans and their passports may carry other visas as well. Meanwhile, a local agency is pursuing the case of the missing passports. One hopes that the high commission is doing the same and that it will soon be able to trace the documents, and, learning from its lapses, install a trouble-free process of obtaining visas.