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New Delhi: India is continuously striving to provide world-class immigration facilities to OCI cardholders and efforts must be taken to ensure that they face no inconvenience when visiting or staying in the country, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Monday.

Launching the revamped portal of the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI), Shah also said the portal with an updated user interface has been introduced to simplify the registration process for overseas citizens.

The home minister said under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is continuously striving to provide world-class immigration facilities to its OCI cardholder citizens.

Noting that many Indian-origin citizens reside in various countries, he said “we must ensure they face no inconvenience when visiting or staying in India”.

“Today, launched the revamped OCI portal with an up-to-date user interface to make registration of overseas citizens seamless. The new features will include improved functionality, enhanced security, and a user-friendly experience,” Shah said in a post on X.

The new portal will provide enhanced functionality, advanced security, and a user-friendly experience for the existing over five million OCI cardholders and new users.

The new OCI portal is available at the existing URL: https://ociservices.gov.in.

The Overseas Citizen of India scheme was introduced through an amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955, in 2005.

The scheme provides for the registration of Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) as Overseas Citizens of India, provided they were citizens of India on or after January 26, 1950, or were eligible to become citizens on that date or their descendants.

However, individuals who are or had been or whose parent or grandparent or great grandparent citizens of Pakistan or Bangladesh are not eligible.

The existing OCI services portal was developed in 2013 and is currently operational in over 180 Indian missions abroad as well as 12 Foreigners Regional Registration Offices (FRROs), processing approximately 2,000 applications per day, an official statement said.

Given the significant technological advancements over the past decade and feedback received from OCI cardholders, a revamped OCI portal has been developed to address existing limitations and enhance user experience.

The new OCI portal introduces several user-friendly features, including: user sign-up and segregation of registration menu, auto-fill of user profile details in registration forms, dashboard displaying completed and partially filled applications, integrated online payment gateway for those who filed in FRROs.

Seamless navigation across application steps, categorization of requisite documents to upload based on application type, integrated FAQ in the portal, and display of eligibility criteria and requisite documents based on selected application type are other key features.

There are a number of technical features in the new portal too. They include high availability with multiple web servers and load balancer on latest operating system, software and platform upgrades, enhanced security protocols, data management, cybersecurity enhancements, among others, the statement said.