Your certificate is missing and the fear that arrived with that discovery is bigger than the problem, so take this first. The qualification is in your institution’s own record. The certificate was a receipt for it. A lost receipt does not undo the thing it was a receipt for, and no register anywhere forgets a result because a sheet of paper went missing from a cupboard. Everything else on this page follows from that one separation. You are not asking for your lost document back. You are asking for a new one, made today, from a record that never doubted you — which means a duplicate is not a copy. It carries today’s date, a new serial, and usually the word duplicate on its face, deliberately, so that nobody can ever be misled by seeing two papers for one result. Then the thing that makes an otherwise insulting process make sense. What you have to establish is the loss, not the merit. Nobody is checking whether you passed. They are establishing where the first certificate is, and every requirement in the process is aimed at that one question rather than at your education. Two more things worth knowing before you apply. A duplicate is drawn from the record as it stands, so an error in the record travels across unchanged — it is not a correction opportunity, and asking for both at once tends to stall both. And you are not stuck while you wait: whoever is asking for the certificate usually needs proof of the qualification rather than that particular sheet, and a verification can often run alongside and arrive first. Where we stop: we obtain the requirement in writing and build the file. We issue nothing, we state no institution’s rules as though they were ours, and we promise no acceptance anywhere.
What this guide covers
Take the fear off the table first, because it is doing more damage than the missing document and because almost nobody says this out loud.
A certificate is not a qualification. It is an acknowledgement, issued once, of something that happened and was recorded elsewhere.
The achievement and the paper are two different objects. Only one of them went missing.
Among the documents a household keeps, that separation is genuinely rare. A passport is the permission, not a record of it. A registration certificate is the registration. For most official documents the paper and the thing are the same object, which is why losing one feels catastrophic. This is one of the few where they genuinely come apart, and nobody mentions it until you are already frightened.
Because somewhere in your institution there is an entry with your enrolment number against it, a result, a session and a date.
That entry is the qualification. It was there before your certificate was printed and it is there now, unaffected by a leaking store room, a house move, a flood or a careless relative.
Which is also why institutions treat this as routine while applicants treat it as a crisis. From their side a request for a re-issue is an ordinary administrative task performed many times a month, with a form and a department and a queue. From your side it is the end of something. Those two experiences of the same event are what make the first phone call so much more frightening than it needs to be.
Which is worth saying in the plainest possible words, because this is the sentence people need.
You lost a document. You did not lose a degree. Nothing about your education is in difficulty, nothing has to be re-earned, and nobody is going to re-examine whether you passed.
We have had people put off applying for months because they were afraid of what they would be told. What they get told, in almost every case, is a roll number and a list of papers to bring.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And the delay almost always has one specific cause, which is worth naming because it is so easily removed. People do not postpone out of laziness. They postpone because they have not yet admitted to anybody that the document is gone — not to the employer waiting, not to the family, sometimes not to themselves. The cupboard gets searched a fourth time instead. Naming the loss out loud is the step that starts the clock.
And the practical value of that reframing is time, which is the only thing this exercise actually costs you.
The weeks lost to dread are longer than the weeks lost to the process. Somebody who understands on day one that their record is safe applies on day two, and the person who does not apply for a month has paid a month for nothing.
There is a second loss hiding inside the first one, and it is the one that actually slows things down: the identifying details that were printed on the certificate. The serial number, the exact course title as the institution writes it, the year and session, the roll number. Those were on the paper and in your memory, and the paper is gone. Recovering them is most of the real work, which is why anything you still hold — a photocopy, an old application, an email — is worth more than it looks.
So describe the loss accurately, because the accurate description is also the reassuring one.
What is gone is a printed acknowledgement, issued on a particular day, of a result that sits in somebody else’s books. The thing that mattered was never in your cupboard.
That independence is worth leaning on when you make contact. You are not asking for a favour or for somebody to vouch for you. You are asking an office to look at its own record and issue what its own record supports, which is a request it exists to handle. Approaching it as a request rather than a plea changes the tone of the conversation and, in our experience, the speed of it.
That register exists for the institution’s own sake rather than as a favour to former students.
It is how they answer anybody who asks about any former student, how they confirm results to employers, how they know who has been conferred what. They have an interest of their own in that record being complete and findable, entirely independent of you.
Which makes one small act worth more to your file than anything else: remembering a number. A roll number or an enrolment number turns a search of a store room into a lookup. Where it is genuinely gone, a year plus an exact course title plus the college name narrows it almost as well — and a vague decade plus a remembered course name does not narrow it at all.
With one honest qualification about older records, since this is where the real difficulty lives.
A record does not vanish, and it can be hard to reach. An old entry may sit in a physical register in a store room, under a number nobody can search by name, in a department reorganised twice since. Hard to retrieve is a different problem from gone, and it is solved by identifying details rather than by persuasion.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
From which comes the one question that orients everything else in this process.
What am I being asked to prove here — that I earned this, or that the paper is gone?
Keeping that straight also protects you from over-supplying. People arrive at the counter with school certificates, employment letters and testimonials, as though the question were whether they are educated. None of that is being asked and none of it helps. What helps is anything that identifies the entry in their record and anything that speaks to where the first document went.
It is always the second, and holding that in mind changes how the whole exercise feels.
Every form, every statement, every supporting document is addressed to the whereabouts of one sheet of paper. Your education is not under examination at any point in this, and nothing you are asked for is a test of it.
Now the thing people are least prepared for, and the one that causes alarm at the worst moment if nobody mentioned it.
What arrives is a new document. Made now, from the record, by the institution.
Nor is it uniform, which is worth expecting. One institution marks it on the face in bold; another puts a single line of small text at the foot; a third distinguishes it only by the serial series. Because practice varies, the right expectation is simply that it will be distinguishable in some way rather than any particular way, and that is the honest thing we can tell you about it in advance.
It makes no attempt to pass as the first document, and that is the feature nobody is braced for.
Most institutions mark it. The word appears on the face of it, or in the serial, or in a line of text somewhere. It is a document that says what it is.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
With the specific differences, so none of them is a surprise when the envelope opens.
| What people expect | What usually arrives |
|---|---|
| The same certificate, reprinted | A new document, issued on today’s date |
| The original serial number | A fresh serial of its own |
| Nothing marking it out | The word duplicate on its face or in its text |
| The old signatories | Whoever holds those offices now |
| The old design | Whatever the institution prints today |
None of those differences says anything about you. They say the document was made at a different time by a different set of people, which is simply true.
And the marking has a reason that is worth understanding, because people read it as a mild accusation.
If two papers for one result were both in circulation and looked identical, anybody seeing one of them could be misled. Marking the second one is how that is prevented — it protects whoever reads the paper, and the institution, rather than labelling you.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Which produces a small piece of practical advice that prevents an awkward conversation.
If you have a photocopy of the old certificate, do not hold the two side by side expecting them to agree. They will not, and nothing has gone wrong.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A thing worth doing when it arrives, before you send it anywhere: read the whole document yourself, slowly, against your other papers. The name, the date of birth, the course title, the year, the division or grade. It is far easier to raise a discrepancy with the institution in the week the document arrives than six months later from another country, with an employer already holding it.
And the reader matters here, because this document will be handed to somebody who has to decide something.
An employer, a university, a verification agency, an embassy. The first thing they see is the marking. How they react depends almost entirely on whether they were expecting it.
One small reassurance about the long run. A duplicate, once issued, is your certificate from then on — it goes into verifications, attestations and applications for the rest of your working life exactly as the first one would have. There is no second-tier status that follows you, and nobody ten years from now will be asking why the document is dated later than the degree. The awkwardness, where there is any, is entirely in the first few months.
Being clear about what we are not saying, because this page is not a warning against duplicates.
A duplicate is a genuine document issued by the institution that conferred the qualification. It is not second-class evidence and it is not a workaround. Whether any particular organisation accepts it is their decision and not something we will promise — what we can tell you is that the surprise, rather than the document, is what creates problems.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
So the instruction, and it costs one sentence in an email.
Tell whoever is waiting, before it reaches them, that what they will receive is marked as a duplicate.
Mentioned beforehand, it is administrative. Discovered on arrival, it is a query. Same document, two different weeks.
Now the part that makes the rest of this process intelligible, and without it the requirements feel like an accusation.
You are not being asked to establish that you earned the qualification. That is settled, in their own books, and nobody is revisiting it.
What you are being asked to establish is the loss.
This is also why the process cannot simply trust your word and be done with it. Not because your word is doubted, but because a word alone leaves no trace that anybody can point at afterwards. The institution needs to be able to show, later and to somebody else, that it took reasonable care before putting a second document into the world. Each requirement is a piece of that showing.
Which is a strange thing to have to prove, because it is the absence of a thing rather than a thing.
Nobody can demonstrate conclusively that a sheet of paper does not exist anywhere. So the process substitutes the best available approximations — a statement, a record of having reported it, a public notice, an undertaking.
And this is worth repeating because people arrive at the counter braced for suspicion.
Nothing in the exercise is a test of your honesty about your education. The result is theirs, recorded by them, and it does not depend on your word at all.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
It is worth being honest that one of those possibilities is the reason the whole system exists. Certificates have been pledged, lent against, left as security and sold. That is a small minority of cases and it is enough to explain why no institution will simply print a second one on request. The caution is aimed at a rare event, and like most such caution it is paid for by everybody.
What is genuinely uncertain is the whereabouts of one object, and uncertain is not the same as doubted.
It may be in a trunk. It may be with a relative who borrowed it for an application. It may have been pledged, lent, left with an agent, or simply put somewhere sensible that nobody now remembers. None of those possibilities is an allegation; all of them are ordinary.
Where a notice is required, one detail decides whether it does its job: the identifying particulars printed in it. A notice naming the holder, the institution, the course, the year and the certificate number is a notice somebody could actually respond to. A notice saying only that a certificate has been lost is a formality that satisfies the requirement and achieves nothing, and it costs the same to publish.
Read the requirements with that in mind and every one of them lines up.
What your institution actually requires differs by university, by department and by year, and we deliberately print no list. Getting their current requirement in writing is the first thing we do for you, and it is the step that decides how long the rest takes.
And the shift in tone is not merely a comfort. People who read the process as an accusation tend to argue with counters, over-explain, and supply the wrong documents in volume. People who read it as a set of questions about an object answer the questions and leave. The second approach is faster, and the difference between them is entirely a matter of what the applicant thinks is being asked.
And once the aim is clear, the tone of the process changes without anything about it changing.
It stops being an interrogation about your past and becomes a set of reasonable questions about an object. Nobody is implying anything about you. They are closing off the possibility that two papers for one result end up in the world.
One small thing about sequence that catches people: some institutions want the report or the notice to have happened before the application rather than alongside it, and will return a file that arrives without them. That is precisely the kind of local detail that no page can state for you and that one written question answers in a day.
One line on the two steps people resent most, and then we will leave them alone.
Where a report to the authorities or a published notice is required, both exist for the same purpose as everything else here: to fix the loss in time and to give anybody holding the document an opportunity to come forward. Our FIR guidance and lost document affidavit pages deal with each of those on their own terms.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Which brings us to the principle underneath the entire process, stated once and then applied.
One achievement, one document in circulation. Never two.
Which also explains a rule that seems unreasonable until you see the reason: that the institution, not you, decides the form the replacement takes. You cannot ask for it unmarked, or in the old design, or with the original date. Those are not preferences being refused; each of them would undo the one protection the exercise exists to provide.
And the reason is about other people rather than about you.
A certificate is relied on by strangers. An employer, a university, a licensing body, a foreign consulate. Each of them is entitled to take the paper in their hands as the only one of its kind, not one of an unknown number of equally official papers.
Follow the alternative through and the caution explains itself.
Two identical certificates, both genuine, both unmarked, could be submitted to two places at once; one could be pledged while the other was produced; a lost one could resurface years later in a stranger’s hands with no way of telling which was which. The institution is not guarding against you. It is guarding against a situation.
Set that against how you would feel on the other side of it. If you were about to employ somebody on the strength of a certificate, you would want the institution behind it to have been careful about how many of those certificates exist. The care that is irritating when it is applied to you is the same care that makes the document worth anything at all when somebody else produces one.
Which reframes the one thing everybody complains about.
The process takes time because the steps that establish a loss take time — a notice has to run, a report has to be made, an office has to find an old entry. None of it is inefficiency for its own sake, and understanding that does not make it faster but does make it bearable.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
So the sentence we find ourselves saying most often on these files.
They are not being difficult about you. They are being careful about a document that strangers will rely on, which is the same care you would want if you were the stranger.
There is a quieter reason to read it properly, too. An undertaking usually commits you to something ongoing — to surrender the original if it appears, to inform them, not to use it. Those obligations outlive the week you sign in, and they get signed in a rush, with somebody waiting behind you, and never read again. Carry a copy home.
With the item that deserves actual attention rather than a signature, because people sign it without reading it.
Somewhere in this process you will almost certainly be asked to state, in writing and in your own name, that the original is lost and that you will do something if it reappears. That is the one document in the file where your word is the evidence, and an undertaking is not a formality.
Read it before you sign it and make sure the facts in it are the facts.
If the certificate was damaged rather than lost, say damaged. If it was left with somebody who cannot now be reached, say that rather than lost. Your account goes down as you give it and we add nothing to it — an account that reads well and does not match the facts is the only element here capable of converting a clerical matter into a far worse one.
And it tends to surface in a specific set of places, which is worth checking once before you ever apply: inside a book, in a file at a parent’s house, with a relative who borrowed it for a form, in an old application folder, at an employer who took it and never returned it, or in a bag that was packed for a trip and never unpacked. Half an hour on that list has ended the exercise for people before it began.
And the situation nobody plans for, which happens more often than you would think.
The duplicate arrives. Four months later the original surfaces, at the bottom of a box, in a file at a relative’s house, inside a book. You now hold two documents for one result, which is precisely the state of affairs the whole process existed to prevent.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Instinct points one way here and the right answer points the other, so we will be blunt about it.
Tell the institution. It is a short, dull conversation when you raise it and a serious one if anybody else ever does. Whatever undertaking you signed almost certainly says so already, and keeping quiet converts a solved problem into an unsolved one with your signature on it.
And do the same for the whole household rather than only for yourself. The documents that go missing in a move are rarely one person’s — they are a family’s, in one trunk, and the person who needs one urgently in three years is usually not the person who packed it. An hour with a phone camera, once, covers everybody in the house.
And the one habit that makes this whole page unnecessary for every other document you own.
Photograph everything, tonight, and put the photographs somewhere that is not the phone. A blurred picture of a certificate is worth a surprising amount when the certificate is gone — it carries the serial, the date, the exact spelling, the roll number. A proper scan is better and a bad photograph beats nothing by a wide margin, and the fetched-record route makes some of this permanent in a way a cupboard never was.
Now the misunderstanding that costs the most money on this subject, and it comes from an entirely reasonable hope.
The duplicate is produced from the entry in their books. Not from your memory, not from what is correct, not from your identity documents.
And the reason it has to work that way is the same principle as everything else here. A document whose content could be adjusted on request at the point of re-issue would not be a reproduction of a record at all; it would be a new statement, made now, about a result from years ago. The faithfulness that frustrates you is what makes the document mean anything.
And the entry is whatever was written down at the time, unchanged.
If your surname was spelled wrong when you enrolled in 2009, that spelling is in the record. The duplicate reproduces it faithfully, because reproducing the record faithfully is the entire job of the document.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Which is the opposite of what people hope for, and the hope is understandable.
The certificate is being reprinted anyway. Somebody is typing it out. Surely this is the moment to fix the thing that has annoyed you for fifteen years. It is not, and asking tends to stall both requests.
There is one version of this worth isolating, because it is the most common and the most awkward. A person whose identity documents have since been corrected — a spelling standardised, an initial expanded — now holds papers that disagree with the record. The duplicate will match the record and not the identity documents, which means the mismatch becomes visible the moment the new certificate is produced. Better to know that this week than to discover it at a verification.
With the errors we see travel across most often.
| What is wrong in the record | What the duplicate will show |
|---|---|
| A misspelled surname | The same misspelling |
| A date of birth that does not match your other papers | The date in the record |
| An initial where a full name should be | The initial |
| A father’s name entered differently | As entered |
| A course title that is not quite what you studied | The recorded title |
Said once, plainly, because this is the sentence that saves people a wasted cycle.
A duplicate reissues the record. A correction changes the record. They are not the same application.
The other reason to keep them apart is evidential rather than administrative. A correction is an assertion that the record is wrong, supported by documents from outside the institution. A duplicate is an assertion that a paper is missing, supported by documents about a loss. Those are different claims resting on different evidence, and bundling them invites each to be judged by the standards of the other.
And putting them together is the practical mistake rather than merely a conceptual one.
A correction needs its own evidence, usually a different department, and its own timeline. Submitted as one request, each half waits for the other and nobody in either office considers the file theirs.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
So the sequencing question, with the logic behind each answer rather than a rule.
Correct first and you end up with one clean document that agrees with your other papers. Obtain the duplicate first and you may end up holding two documents that disagree with each other — and that disagreement is something you carry for a working lifetime. Which order your institution prefers is a question for them, and the name correction route is a separate exercise with its own page.
Ask both questions in the same message rather than in two, as well. Departments answer what they are asked, and a message about a duplicate gets a duplicate answer even where the person replying knew perfectly well that a correction was pending. One message naming both situations gets you the sequencing advice you actually need, from somebody who can see both halves.
Which is the cheapest instruction here and the one most often skipped.
Before anything is submitted, ask your institution both questions together: what their current requirement is for a duplicate, and whether a correction should precede it. One written answer, obtained before the first form, prevents the whole exercise being run twice.
With one honest note about correcting after the fact, since some people will read this page too late.
It is still possible and it is more work, because now two documents exist and both may need attention. Not a catastrophe, and not free either — which is the whole argument for asking the question in the first week rather than the fifth.
And correcting afterwards has one extra complication worth naming now, because people do not anticipate it. Once a corrected record exists, the duplicate you already hold shows the old version — so you may find yourself needing a further re-issue to bring the document into line with the record. That is the second cycle this page is trying to save you, and it is the whole reason the order matters.
This next part saves more time than anything else here, and the duplicate itself barely features in it.
Almost nobody applies for one of these out of tidiness. There is a deadline behind it: an offer, an admission, a visa, a promotion, a verification agency waiting.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
It is also worth separating the two kinds of asker, because they behave differently. An employer or an admissions office is generally solving a verification problem and will accept whatever reliably solves it. A consulate or a statutory body is generally following a written rule and cannot accept a substitute however reasonable. Knowing which of those you are dealing with tells you immediately whether the parallel route is worth pursuing.
And the deadline is the thing to solve, which is not the same as solving the certificate.
Somebody has asked for your degree certificate. What they almost always need is satisfaction that the qualification is real — and the certificate is one of several ways of providing that, which happens to be the slowest one available to you right now.
Which is why the first question to ask yourself is not about the certificate at all. It is: what happens to me on the date this is due, and who decides that? Once the deadline has a name and a person attached to it, the problem becomes solvable in parallel. Left as a general dread about a missing document, it stays a single-track wait with nothing you can do.
Which is worth testing rather than assuming, in either direction.
Some organisations genuinely require the physical document and will not move. Many will accept confirmation direct from the institution, an official fetched record, or a verification report. You cannot know which you are dealing with until you ask, and asking costs one email.
Verification has one feature that makes it unusually useful here and that people do not realise: it usually travels from the institution directly to whoever asked, rather than through your hands. An employer values precisely that, since the confirmation never passes through your hands at all. A document you hand over can be questioned; a confirmation that arrived from the university’s own office generally is not.
Which gives the piece of structural advice that, after the opening section, earns its place here more than any other.
Set the quick route going in parallel with the duplicate rather than behind it in a queue.
They are different offices doing different things and neither waits for the other. People routinely hold the fast one back until the slow one fails, which wastes exactly the weeks that mattered. A degree verification, a marksheet verification or a transcript can be moving while the duplicate is still being printed.
Set out so you can see what is actually available to you this week.
The fourth item on that list is worth a line of its own, because people undervalue it badly. An old photocopy of the lost certificate, even an indifferent one, carries the serial number, the exact wording, the date of issue and the spelling as the institution wrote it. That is the whole identifying set. Where it still exists, a certified copy of it is sometimes enough to satisfy a reader while the duplicate is pending.
Being straight about the limit, because the fifth item above is where hope outruns reality.
An acknowledgement that you have applied is not the certificate, and an organisation entitled to insist on the document is entitled to insist. What a bridge buys you is weeks, not a different outcome.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
There is a version of this that is worth a line because it ends the whole exercise for a small number of people every year: occasionally the deadline was never about the certificate. An employer asked for it as part of a standard list, nobody at that end needed it urgently, and a single email moved the date by a month at no cost to anybody. It is worth finding out whether you are in that group before you spend a rupee.
Which reduces the whole of this section to one message somebody has to send.
Not us, and not the institution. The person holding the deadline. They are the only one who can tell you what will satisfy them, and until they have, everybody is guessing at the specification.
And phrase it as a question about their requirement rather than as a confession about your paperwork. “Which forms of proof of the qualification do you accept?” invites a list. “I have lost my degree certificate, is that a problem?” invites reassurance or alarm, neither of which tells you anything you can act on. The first version is the same email with a better answer attached.
With two small disciplines that make that message useful rather than reassuring.
Ask in writing, so the answer is a document rather than a recollection. And ask in the first week rather than the fourth, because the point of the answer is to change what you do next, and in the fourth week there is nothing left to change.
Nor will we approach your institution on your behalf as though we were you. The correspondence goes out identifying who we are and who we act for, and anything requiring your signature comes back to you to sign. It costs a day now and then, and it is the one way of doing this that leaves you with a file you could walk anybody through.
Having spent this long on other people’s requirements, it is time to be precise about ours.
We do not issue certificates, state what your institution requires as though it were our rule, promise that a duplicate will be accepted anywhere, correct any record, or put words into your account of what happened.
And the questions that belong to them rather than to us, worth sending in one email.
Five questions, one email, free, and an answer in days. That answer is the single best predictor of how long your file takes, and we send it for you before anything is submitted rather than after a file comes back.
One closing table, drawn from the files that arrived after a whole cycle had already been spent.
| What was believed | What was the case |
|---|---|
| My degree is in danger | The result is in their register and was never at risk |
| They will reprint my certificate | They issue a new one, dated today and marked as a duplicate |
| I have to prove I studied there | You have to establish where the first paper went |
| They can fix the spelling while they are at it | The error is in the record and travels onto the duplicate |
| I threw the burnt one away to be tidy | Whatever survives is the cleanest evidence of the loss |
| Nothing can move until the duplicate arrives | A verification can run alongside and often arrives first |
Carelessness explains none of them. Every one is a reasonable guess at a process that gets explained only once you are already in the middle of it.
Orders for this reach us from a small number of fairly predictable positions.
The last is the one this service exists for. A returned file costs a full cycle, and the item that caused it is almost always something that could have been established by one written question at the start.
A note on institutions that no longer exist in the form you knew. A college that was absorbed, a university that was split, a board renamed: the record survived every one of those events, and it is now held by whoever inherited it. Establishing who that is can take a week on its own and it is entirely establishable, and it is the one situation where starting with the current institution’s own enquiry desk rather than the old address saves real time.
In order, because the first item changes what the rest has to contain.
Where originals or collection are the obstacle rather than the paperwork, pickup and delivery and an authority letter usually solve the part of this that distance makes hard.
One rule of ours, and it is not negotiable on this file above all others.
Your account of the loss is yours and we record it as you give it. We do not date a statement earlier than it was made, call a document lost where you have said it was damaged, or tidy a sequence of events into something that reads more neatly.
On this particular exercise that matters more than usual, because the statement of loss is the one document in the file where your own word is the evidence. A tidy version that does not match what happened is the single thing capable of turning an ordinary administrative matter into a serious one.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Four parties have a hand in this file. Precisely one of them is us, so here is the division.
| The part | Whose it is |
|---|---|
| Issuing the certificate, and deciding its form | Your institution’s, entirely |
| Setting the requirement, and changing it | Theirs, and it differs by department and year |
| The statement of loss and the undertaking | Yours, in your own words, signed by you |
| Whether a duplicate satisfies them | Whoever asked you for the document |
| Anything contested — a refusal, a record that cannot be found | An advocate’s |
| Getting the requirement in writing and building the file | Ours |
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
With the discipline inside our half, named so there is no doubt about it.
We do not certify that a document was lost, that a copy is a true copy, that a record is correct, or that an application is complete in the institution’s eyes. Those are the institution’s statements and a notary’s, not a preparer’s. In place of that you get a written note of every item we expect somebody to come back on.
And our charge, with no more dressing than it gets on any other page here.
We charge ₹1,500 for obtaining the requirement, reconciling your details and assembling the file, usually ready within 15 – 45 days. It is not the institution’s fee and it is not contingent on issue, which is not ours to grant and not ours to hurry.
Whatever your institution charges is paid to them directly, and so is any charge for a notice, a report or an attestation. If somebody tells you a duplicate can be arranged faster for a sum paid to a person rather than to the institution, that is not a fee and the conversation should end there. Where the document is for use abroad, the apostille or attestation step follows issue rather than running alongside it, and where an institution has been renamed or merged, the migration, equivalence and medium of instruction papers tend to be asked for in the same breath. A tidy file of all of it, kept once, prevents the next ten years of this.
There is a mirror case worth knowing: the document that has not gone missing but has not yet been produced. Provisional certificate assistance covers the interim certificate, why nobody in the chain can speed the real one up, and why it quietly stops working after a few years.
We write to your institution for its current requirement and the department that will process it, reconcile your enrolment details and identity documents against each other so a query does not come back, assemble the statement of loss in your own words with whatever the requirement names, arrange copies, translations and attestations where needed, and hand you a dated follow-up schedule. We issue no certificate, state no institution’s rules as our own, correct no record, and promise acceptance nowhere — anything contested belongs with an advocate you engage and pay directly.
Everything this page leaves out, and the reason for each omission
Absent here: the name of any institution or university; any form name or number; any fee other than ours; any list of what a particular institution requires; any period for issue beyond what the service itself carries; any statement that a duplicate will be accepted by an employer, a university, an agency or a consulate; and any description of what the lost document legally is or does. On a page about replacing a lost certificate, that removes nearly every concrete thing somebody searching this subject hoped to be handed.
Three reasons, and the first of them is unusually strong on this subject. Requirements here are genuinely local: they differ between universities, between departments inside one university, and between years in one department, and a list printed here would put somebody in front of a clerk holding the wrong set of papers, at the price of an entire cycle. That is not a theoretical risk, it is the single commonest way this exercise goes wrong. Second, acceptance is somebody else’s decision and a page promising it would be promising on behalf of an employer nobody here has met. Third, and decisively, the one document in this file where the applicant’s own word is the evidence is the statement of loss — and a website that supplied specimen wording for that would be supplying the words a person swears to. We will not write that paragraph for anybody, here or in a file.
Strip all of it away and what is left holds whatever any institution changes. That the qualification sits in a record and the certificate was a receipt for it, so a lost certificate endangers nothing. That what is issued in its place is a new document bearing today’s date and usually marked as a duplicate, deliberately, to protect whoever reads it. That the thing to be established is the loss rather than the merit, which is why every requirement points at a sheet of paper and not at an education. That two documents for one result must never circulate, which is the whole reason for the care and the delay — and the reason to speak up if the first one reappears. That a duplicate reproduces the record exactly as it stands, errors included, so correcting a name is a separate exercise whose order matters. And that the deadline behind the urgency can usually be answered while the duplicate is still coming.
Of everything above, the part worth keeping is the two emails. One to the institution asking what it requires now and which department processes it. One to whoever is waiting, asking what they will actually accept. Both are free, both come back within days, and between them they decide how long this takes and whether your deadline survives. In the files that went badly, almost always neither email was sent — not through carelessness, but because the person was busy searching cupboards for a document that was not going to be found.
Where to go rather than here. To your institution, in writing, for the requirement, the department and the order of correction. To whoever set your deadline, in writing, for what satisfies them. To the verification route in parallel, because it answers a different question faster. To a notary or the attesting authority for anything that has to be sworn or attested, which is their act and not ours. And to an advocate if this ever stops being paperwork — a refusal, a record that cannot be located, or a dispute about what you completed.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Two doors, both free. Clients search a factual directory of enrolled advocates. Advocates apply to be listed on it — no fee, no commission, nothing paid in either direction.
Search Bar Council enrolled advocates by what your matter is about, by court, or by city. Searching and sending a request are both free.
Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates