SRINAGAR: India has started the ‘visa on arrival’ facility for senior citizens from Pakistan.
The facility was supposed to start on January 15 as part of the new liberalised visa policy agreed by the two countries making efforts to improve ties, but was suspended following heightened tensions over a series of border clashes, the worst in a decade.
The visas are valid for Pakistani citizens who are above the age of 65.
“We have launched visa on arrival facility to Pakistani senior citizens at the Attari Integrated Check Post from April 1,” a Union Home Ministry official told the Press Trust of India.
However, decision on the stalled group tourist visa facility to Pakistani nationals is still pending.
The two countries had agreed to operationalise the group tourist visa facility to be offered to each other’s citizens from March 15. The reason for the sudden launch of the visa for Pakistani senior citizens was not immediately known, the PTI reported.
The new visa agreement was signed last September to ease cross-border travel as part of a number of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) between the two nuclear-armed countries that have gone to war thrice.
India and Pakistan have been making efforts to improve ties with each other for many years now. But the peace process was dented after the attacks on the Mumbai city in 2008, with India blaming Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba for it.
The latest to come was in January after the killing of soldiers in a series of clashes on the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between the two countries. (Read: Amid tensions, India, Pakistan meet on Kashmir border)
Some clauses of the relaxed visa regime like multiple-entry and reporting-free visas for businessmen and allowing them to travel to five cities instead of the earlier three were operationalised when Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik visited New Delhi in December.
