I am a lecturer by profession, an employee of a college in the federal capital. On my vacation this year, I planned to go to UK and applied for a visa. After completing all the requirements I paid about Rs 10, 000 as visa fee. After 20 days, when I went to collect my passport, I found out that the visa was not issued but the fee had been charged. The reason cited was that I could overstay. They did not even consider the fact that I could not stay for more than six weeks as I had a permanent job here. Moreover, the British High Commission (BHC) simply asked me to appeal against the decision meaning loss of another Rs 10000. It was not important to go to UK for vacation but those Rs 10,000 surely were. My question is, if you are not issuing the visa, why should you charge the full visa fee? Deducting processing fees is justified but taking the entire Rs 10000 is unfair. That is a huge amount of money. I went to Visa office twice and every time I found a good one km long line of people standing outside for visa. I wonder how many of them had lost their money, time and energy for nothing. It is a thought provoking moment for our government. We, the Pakistanis are being looted in our own country and our government is doing nothing to protect the rights of its citizens.-SIMMI GUL, Islamabad, via e-mail, June 27.