Pakistan team able to attend startup summit in India with US facilitation
A group of six Pakistani entrepreneurs finally reached India to take part in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit-2017 in Hyderabad.
The team has faced a tedious and aggressive visa process when some of the team members reached late to Indian Embassy to keep 30 days prior request.
The issue raised because the rules required that participants apply for the visa 30 days before the event began, which the Pakistani delegation couldn’t fulfil.
However, the involvement of US State Department and U.S. Embassy in Pakistan stepped in and worked closely with the Indian High Commission in Islamabad due to which delegation acquired the visa.
According to sources Meenah Tariq, Head of Strategy and Accelerator, Invest 2 Innovate, Pakistan, who got the visa within a day.
Another Pakistani participant Sadia Bashir, who was coming from the United States, was also assisted by the US Embassy. The Indian authorities asked her to submit a long list of official documents, something she couldn’t do as time was running out.
She works for a start-up project supported by the US State Department that counsels women.
The Global Entrepreneurship Summit-2017 is jointly organised by the U.S. and Indian governments after intervention from the US State Department.
According to sources, Indian facet didn’t insist on paperwork apart from the registration for the GES occasion and passports. It allowed the workforce to deposit their paperwork in designated drop packing containers and the visas got inside two days.
The other member Tariq said that the bigger problem was that there were no direct flights. “Door to door, it took 30 hours for us to get to Hyderabad from Islamabad as we had to fly via Abu Dhabi, Mumbai and to Hyderabad and all the flights had long layovers.