The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has instructed all airlines not to check-in any passenger who has a Chinese visa stapled on his or her passport.
The instruction, issued late last evening, asks all airlines to "ensure that they do not check-in any passenger with stapled Chinese visa on their passports," official sources said here.
The DGCA instruction comes weeks after India declared as "invalid" the standalone paper visas given by the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata to Indians from Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh.
A travel advisory issued by the external affairs ministry last month asked those going to China to ensure that their visas are pasted on their passports. "Such paper visas stapled to the passport are not considered valid for travel out of the country," it said.
Following the advisory, the civil aviation ministry issued a directive that passengers holding stapled visas should not be checked-in for travel out of India.
In November, New Delhi had slammed this practice of issuing separate visas "to certain categories of Indian nationals on the basis of their domicile, ethnicity and/or place of issue of the passport".
India also took up the issue with China at the highest levels. Apparently, the Chinese embassy has not stopped the practice, which has provoked New Delhi to issue the travel advisory rendering separate visas as invalid.
