Around 800,000 Americans travelled to India last year.

Kumar also underscored the centrality of people-to-people contacts to the deepening India-US ties. 'People-to-people contacts are the foundation of everything we do together,' she said.

Costing around $10 million, the new consular section doubles the waiting area, triples customer seating, adds a modern queuing system to guide customers through the visa process and adds many new interviewing windows to ensure that visa applicants and American citizens can speak to an officer more quickly and in a comfortable environment.

The waiting time for the much-coveted US visa has been reduced from around two months to two weeks due to a slew of initiatives taken by the US embassy over the years.

A new consulate in Hyderabad that opened in November 2008 has already issued more than 30,000 visas. There have also been dramatic expansions in the consulates in Chennai and Kolkata and a new consular facility is in advanced stages of construction in Mumbai's northern suburbs.