BENGALURU: To facilitate travel throughout the Schengen area and help issue long-term visas more easily, France, in line with all the countries of the Schengen area, will issue biometric visas to Indian citizens with effect from November 2. In this context, the French Embassy in India will offer a large number of 3-to-5-year circulation visas to frequent visitors to France.
Eight new VFS centres have been opened across India, bringing up their number to 14 (Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kolkata, Mumbai, Puducherry and Pune) to ensure proximity to the applicants.
All visa applicants will now be asked to come in person at the listed VFS centre of their choice to register their biometric data. Children under the age of 12 years are exempted from this procedure. The recorded biometric data will be stored for a period of 59 months. The data will be valid during this period for all Schengen Area countries (similarly, the data recorded by any Schengen area country will be valid for France during the 59 months).
The VFS centres will take fingerprints of both hands as well as photographs of the applicants. The procedure takes just a few minutes. This biometric data will then be stored in a secured system called the Visa Information System (VIS), which can be accessed by all Schengen area countries and solely by them. Visas issued prior to the introduction of biometrics will remain valid, said the press release.