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India is currently the second most populous nation on
earth with 1.2 billion people - and the DIAC New Delhi post sits right in the middle of this,
in New Delhi, which is a city of 20 million people, approximately the size of Australia.
There are 140 people in total in the New Delhi post, nine of which are 'A' based and 130
of which are local staff spread across seven teams managing the complete diverse range of
DIAC case loads.
We have approximately 40 people in the visitor team and they process over 100 000
visitor visas every year.
Our client service team has about six people managing over 4 000 calls and 1 000 emails
a week.
We also have a student team, a family migration team, we have a referrals team that
manages a broad range of site visits across all of India and Nepal and we also have a
refugee and humanitarian caseload that we operate out of both Nepal for Bhutanese and
India for Burmese.
I'm a Senior Migration Officer here at New Delhi post.
I'm currently managing the visitor visa program.
The visitor's team is divided into two sub teams - the parents team and the non-parents
team.
The parents team was put together principally because the largest cohort we have are
parents wishing to travel to Australia to visit their children who are either working or
studying there.
I'm one of the team leaders in the visitors team looking after the parents section.
The team is responsible for processing the visitor visa applications and the team
processes around 8 000 applications in a month, and it is quite commendable that the team
has been able to achieve their monthly targets every month so far.
Over the last couple of years, the number of Indians travelling to Australia has gone up
to around 150 000 to 160 000 per year.
At the same time, we have got around 160 000 to 170 000 Australians coming here.
That means that a lot of Australians are coming up to India to have a look at this
wonderful, terrific, diverse country but they're also coming up here to do all sorts of
other things which are about driving that relationship, creating those human bonds which
will sustain the relationship into the future.
With 130 staff, there's lots of stories here.
We have staff from all over India from the North in Punjab to Chennai in the south.
One of the great recent stories is one of our leaders is about to migrate with his wife,
whom he met at the High Commission, and they are migrating to Australia to take up a
state sponsored skilled position in Adelaide, which I think says a lot about the
commitment and the love of Australia from this post.