How to get Birth Certificate Apostille?

What is apostille?

It is a way to legalize your documents. If you are travelling or doing business in abroad the rule is that all the relevant documents needs to be processed through MEA for verification purpose, MEA will provide a sticker which is called apostille. This sticker (Apostille ) will contain a tracking number for the country you are travelling through which authenticity of the documents can be verified.

It is always better to get all the relevant documents apostilled before leaving the country.

https://www.apostilleservice.co.in/what-is-apostille/

Birth certificate is the first document you get from the government. First your birth will be registered in hospital and later the birth certificate will be issued from municipal corporation. In the old birth certificates, name of the person will not be there because traditionally people were used to name their baby after 1 month of birth. So for the older birth certificates, you need to get the birth certificate reissued.

Below are the situations where you need apostille birth certificate.

1. Travelling on work VISA
2. Travelling on dependent Visa(wife or husband)
3. For kids schooling in foreign country (Schools need birth certificate of your kids to get them admitted in school).
4. Student visa (Universities & consulate need this to verify your age)

How to get birth certificate apostille?

There are two ways of getting apostille to documents.

1. State Attestation + MEA apostille
2. SDM attestation + MEA apostille

State attestation

All the document will belong to one or the other states in India.

In order to increase the authenticity or to ensure less fraudulent documents before getting the apostille MEA will ask State attestation.

State attestation will be done by the secreteriarate of the region.

The secreteriarate will be there for every district.

The state attestation will take time since lot of government bodies are involved. Once you submit the document at secreteriarate of office it will be sent to the concerned government body. Example if it is a marriage certificate it will be sent to the registrar, they will sign the document, which implies that the document is issued from their department and it is legal. Then the document comes back to secreteriarate they will put a seal again.

Once the document has state attestation the document is ready for MEA apostille

SDM attestation

State attestation takes lot of time 30 working days. In order to eliminate that we have another process that is SDM attestation.

SDM full form is sub divisional magistrate. SDM will authenticate on behalf of state government, then this will be sent to MEA for document apostille.

This method works for only Hague nations, meaning if your travel destination is hague nation list it will work. Except Italy and Austria for these two countries state attestation is a must condition.

What all documents are required to get apostille birth certificate?

Ministry of external affairs (MEA) only accepts original document to put apostille.

We need Your original or online verified Birth certificate.

Additional to that we need Passport photocopy of the person, On whose name the document was issued.

You can also read following articles for clearer picture.

1.What is state attestation?

2.What is apostille in detail?