A Bangladeshi student suffers from remote study and struggles to enter Finland.

Finland has always been one of my dream destinations for higher studies and as elated as I was with the offer, I hoped to start my visa application and processing as soon as possible. I applied for Residence Permit in July 2020 and after a long period of delay, got an appointment from the Finnish Embassy in New Delhi in April 2021. I had prepared all my documents accordingly and was ready to travel to Delhi to attend my interview when they abruptly closed operations just a few days prior to my appointment due to the massive outbreak of COVID 19 at an alarming rate.

I have been pursuing online studies after getting my admission offer which is not so beneficial in many ways. Some of my courses required me to give offline examinations on campus while others had practical exam credits. These are things I missed out on, due to online studies and my performance kept deteriorating.

This may have been the case for many other Bangladeshi students. As such, before and during my studies, I wrote to Migri, appealing to them to either arrange the residence permit processing to be done at the VFS at Dhaka, Bangladesh or allow us to go to countries with VFS other than India. This would really benefit many aspiring applicants like me who want to go to Finland for higher studies.

However, they turned down our request (me and others) saying that this would give us an unfair advantage and they could not be partial to any particular country or ethnicity.

As such, I am now again stuck for an uncertain period of time - unsure of my fate.

-- Please sign the petition: bit.ly/ReformMigri