Embassy attestation is not an upgrade on an apostille. It is the older system, and it survives only where the 1961 Convention does not reach — which is a shrinking list. Two destinations moved in the last year, and the dates decide everything. According to the Hague Conference, Viet Nam deposited its accession on 31 December 2025 and the convention entered into force for it on 11 September 2026. The embassy route for Viet Nam is already closed. Thailand deposited on 30 June 2026 and the convention enters into force on 28 February 2027 — so the embassy route is still the route for Thailand, until that morning. They are alternatives, never both. Where the convention applies, an apostille replaces legalisation and a mission cannot demand its own stamp as well. Where it does not, no apostille can be issued for you. And on the Indian side nobody is checking your document. The State authority certifies the issuing officer. The Ministry certifies the State authority — it says in terms that it does not verify the contents. The mission certifies the Ministry. It is a chain of signatures, and it cannot be done out of order. One figure worth knowing before anybody quotes you a package. The Ministry's own page states that normal attestation is free of charge; the agency charge it names is ₹90 per document plus ₹3 per page. The expensive link is the mission, and no two missions charge the same. A document sent down the wrong route does not get corrected at the end of it. It starts again at the first office, with the fees paid twice.
What is on this page
A document issued in one country has no automatic standing in another. A registrar in Jalandhar signs a birth certificate under Indian law, and an official in a foreign ministry abroad has no way of knowing whether that signature belongs to a real registrar, whether that office exists, or whether the seal is the right one. Legalisation is the system built to answer that, and it predates the alternative by a long way.
It answers it by chain. Somebody in India who is in a position to know vouches for the issuing officer. Somebody above them vouches for that person. And finally the destination country's own mission in India vouches for the last Indian signature, which is a signature its own ministry recognises. By the time the document lands abroad, the foreign official is not trusting a registrar in Jalandhar. They are trusting their own embassy.
That is the whole design, and once it is clear a great deal of what follows stops being arbitrary. Every rule about order, originals and legible seals exists because each office can only do its one job if the office before it did its job visibly.
The foreign official never trusts the Indian registrar. They trust their own embassy, which trusted the Ministry, which trusted the State. That is the entire architecture, and every rule below follows from it.
People come to this subject asking for a stamp. There is no stamp. There is a sequence, and the value is in the sequence being complete and in the right order.
The practical consequence is the single most important thing on this page: the chain cannot be done out of order, and it cannot be partly redone. If the State authentication is missing, the Ministry has nothing to act on. If the Ministry attestation is missing, the mission has nothing to act on. And if the whole chain was run for the wrong route, the completed chain is not converted at the end; the document goes back to the first office.
This is also why the exercise feels so disproportionate to what is being achieved. A birth certificate travelling through three offices over several weeks, to produce marks that say nothing about the birth, strikes most people as absurd the first time they encounter it. It is not absurd; it is just the cost of a system in which no official trusts a foreign signature they cannot check.
Each office in the chain is asking one narrow question: is the mark immediately below mine genuine, and is it the mark of somebody entitled to make it.
The State authority can answer that about an issuing officer in its own State, because it holds the specimen signatures. The Ministry can answer it about a designated State authority, because the States notify their designated signatories to it. The mission can answer it about the Ministry, because the Ministry's own specimen signatures sit with every mission in Delhi. No office in the chain is being asked to do anything it is not in a position to do.
Which explains the rule people find most frustrating, that you cannot skip a step even when the document is obviously genuine. The Ministry is not refusing to believe your degree. It is unable to certify a signature it has no means of recognising, and your certainty about the document is not evidence it can act on.
The Ministry puts it plainly on its own page: what it works from is the signature of a designated signing authority, and the contents of the document are not something it examines.
That sentence deserves more attention than it gets, because it cuts against what almost everybody assumes an attested document means. A fully legalised document is not a document that any government has checked. It is a document whose signature history has been traced. If the underlying certificate states something untrue, every office in the chain will still attest it, because none of them is looking at that.
Two consequences follow. A receiving institution that treats legalisation as verification has misunderstood it, and several of them run their own verification at source in addition, which is a different exercise and is why a degree verification request sometimes arrives after the attestation is complete. And a client who hopes attestation will paper over a problem in the document is hoping for something the system does not do.
A fully legalised document is not a checked document. Its signature history has been traced; its contents have not been examined by anybody. Institutions that treat legalisation as verification have misunderstood it — which is why some run their own verification at source as well.
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Attestation and legalisation get used interchangeably, including by people who should be precise, and the loose usage hides a real distinction.
In Indian practice, attestation is usually what the Indian authorities do: the State authority's mark and the Ministry's mark. Legalisation is usually what the destination country's mission does at the end. The Ministry's own material uses normal attestation for the route that leads to a mission, as against apostille for the route that does not.
The distinction matters at the point of asking for things. If you tell an agency you need attestation and mean the complete chain, and they quote for attestation meaning the Indian half, you have a disagreement that will surface two offices later. And if a receiving institution abroad asks for a legalised document, it means the thing with the mission mark on it, not the thing with the Ministry mark on it.
So when anybody uses either word, the useful follow-up is the same: which offices, in what order, ending where.
When anybody says attestation or legalisation, ask the same follow-up: which offices, in what order, ending where. The words are used loosely enough that the answer is the only reliable part.
This is the structural point that organises everything else. The two systems are alternatives. They are not stages of one process, and you do not do one and then the other.
If the 1961 Convention is in force between India and the destination, that certificate is the formality and this chain is not. The treaty exists precisely to do away with legalisation as between its members, which is why a member State mission has no basis to ask for its own stamp on top.
Where it does not apply, there is no apostille available to you at all for that destination, and the chain ending at the mission is the only way through.
What this means in practice is that there is exactly one question to answer before any money is spent, and the rest of the route follows from it mechanically. What the apostille certificate itself attests, which documents fall outside it, and how an apostille is verified are dealt with on our apostille assistance page rather than repeated here.
If somebody offers to do both, stop. On an apostille destination the mission stamp cannot be required and will not be accepted as a substitute. People pay for both out of caution, and the second one buys nothing.
Is the place where this document will actually be produced inside the 1961 Convention, as at the date it will be produced there.
Three parts of that sentence are doing work and each is a trap in its own right. Where the document will be produced — not where the applicant lives, not where the employer is headquartered, not where the document was issued. Party to the convention — a status that can change, and has. As at the date it will be produced — not the date you start, which can be months earlier.
Settle that one question and everything after it is administration. Get it wrong and everything downstream is wasted, because the completed chain does not convert.
It is also the question most enquiries arrive having skipped. People come with the document, the destination and a budget, and the conversation has to go backwards before it can go forwards. That is not a criticism of the client; it is a consequence of how the subject is written about, where the route is usually assumed and the process described in detail. The detail is the easy part.
Two independent checks, and they take an afternoon.
First, ask the institution that will receive the document. In writing. A university, a hospital's HR department, a licensing council or a foreign ministry will tell you whether it wants an apostille or a legalised document, and that answer carries more weight than any general statement because it comes from the body that will accept or reject the paper. Keep the reply.
Second, check the destination's position independently against the status table published by the Hague Conference, which is where accessions and entry-into-force dates are recorded. Do this even if the institution has answered, because institutional checklists lag behind treaty changes by months and sometimes years.
Where the two disagree, that disagreement is itself the finding, and it is worth going back to the institution with the date rather than guessing which of them is right.
Keep the written answer. When an institution later asks why the document carries an apostille rather than a mission stamp, or the reverse, the email in which it told you what it wanted is the complete answer.
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In our experience the enquiries fall into four groups, and the group usually predicts which documents are involved.
Employment abroad. Degrees, diplomas, professional council registrations, experience letters and a police clearance certificate. The commonest category by a distance, and the most time-pressured because a joining date is usually fixed.
Study abroad. Degrees, marksheets and transcripts, often alongside a separate verification at source and sometimes an equivalence or credential evaluation exercise.
Marriage or family matters abroad. Birth and marriage certificates, a single status affidavit, and occasionally a death certificate where an estate or a remarriage is involved.
Business. Incorporation documents, board resolutions and commercial invoices, which travel a different pre-authentication route through a Chamber of Commerce.
Knowing which group you are in is useful at the first conversation, because it tells us which pre-authentication applies and therefore where the file starts.
Employment files are the time-pressured ones. A joining date is usually fixed before the attestation is started, and the educational route is the slowest of the three because it waits on a university. Start that one first.
Four things, and all four are cheap to establish at the start and expensive to discover later.
The destination and its convention position on the date the document will be produced, which decides the route. What the receiving institution has actually asked for, in writing where it exists. The document itself, meaning whether it was in fact registered and issued, whether the name matches the passport, whether the issuing seal is legible and whether anybody has laminated it. And which pre-authentication category it falls into, because personal, educational and commercial documents start in different places.
We will not quote before those four are settled, and that is not caution for the sake of it. A quote given before them is a quote for a route that may not be the route, and we would rather have an awkward first conversation than an awkward sixth week.
The 1961 Convention has been gaining members steadily for six decades, and each accession moves a destination from the legalisation column to the apostille column. There is no movement in the other direction in practice: countries join, they do not leave.
Which means the embassy route is structurally shrinking, and material written about it ages in one specific way. It does not become wrong about the process; the chain works the same as it always did. It becomes wrong about who the process applies to, which is worse, because the error is invisible until the mission declines the document.
At the accession described two sections below, the convention had 130 Contracting Parties. That number is a moving figure and it is given here only to indicate scale, not as something to rely on.
There is a second-order effect worth noticing. Because the embassy route is shrinking, the services built around it have an incentive not to mention that it may not apply to you. A business whose product is the mission step does not lead with the possibility that your destination no longer needs one. We are in that position too, which is why this page puts the route question first and says plainly that on an apostille destination the mission stamp cannot be demanded.
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According to the Hague Conference on Private International Law, Viet Nam deposited its instrument of accession on 31 December 2025, and the convention entered into force for Viet Nam on 11 September 2026.
Those two dates are different and the difference is the whole point. The accession is the act; the entry into force is when it starts to govern. Between 31 December 2025 and 11 September 2026 the embassy route for Viet Nam was still the correct route, and a document legalised during that window was correctly legalised.
From 11 September 2026 it is not. An apostille is the formality for Viet Nam, and the mission cannot require legalisation in addition. Anybody who started a legalisation chain for Viet Nam during 2026 and is still in it has a file that cannot complete as planned, and is most likely closer to finished than they think, because the Indian half of both routes is shared.
Viet Nam. Instrument of accession deposited 31 December 2025; the Convention of 5 October 1961 entered into force for Viet Nam on 11 September 2026 (Hague Conference on Private International Law). The embassy route for Viet Nam is closed; an apostille is the formality.
The same source records that Thailand deposited its instrument of accession on 30 June 2026, and that the convention enters into force for Thailand on 28 February 2027.
So Thailand is in the opposite position to Viet Nam, and it is the more interesting of the two for anybody planning. The embassy route for Thailand is correct today and remains correct until the end of February 2027. It stops being correct the following morning.
If your document will be produced in Thailand comfortably before that date, proceed on the legalisation chain. If it will be produced after it, the apostille is the formality and a mission legalisation obtained in the meantime will not be what the receiving body is expecting. And if it falls near the changeover, that is precisely the case to put to the receiving institution in writing, because what matters is what they will accept on the day.
Thailand. Instrument of accession deposited 30 June 2026; the Convention enters into force for Thailand on 28 February 2027, at which accession the Convention had 130 Contracting Parties (Hague Conference on Private International Law). Until that date the embassy route is the route.
Almost every article on this subject prints a list of countries. We will not, and the two accessions above are the reason.
A list is a snapshot. It is correct on the day it is written and it decays silently, because nothing on the page tells the reader it has aged. A reader arriving two years later sees a confident list, follows it, and discovers the error at the mission counter after paying for a chain.
A date is different. "Thailand, from 28 February 2027" carries its own expiry inside it, and a reader can test it against today. So this page gives dates for the two destinations that moved recently and sends you to the status table for everything else. That is less convenient and it is the only version that stays true.
A date carries its own expiry; a list does not. "Thailand, from 28 February 2027" can be tested against today. A country list printed two years ago looks exactly as confident as one printed this morning.
If you have a chain in progress and the destination has changed status, stop and work out where you actually are rather than starting again.
Both routes share their Indian half: the State or Chamber authentication, then the Ministry. If those are done, the work is done; what changes is the last step. On the apostille route the Ministry issues the apostille itself, so there is no further office to visit. On the legalisation route the document goes on to the mission.
The practical question to ask whoever is handling your file is therefore narrow and answerable: which marks are already on the document, and given the destination's position today, what is the single remaining step. An agency that cannot answer that in a sentence is not tracking your file.
It also means a refund conversation may be the wrong conversation. If an agency has obtained the State and Ministry marks, that work was necessary on either route and has not been wasted. What is arguably owed is the completion of the correct final step without a second charge, since the route was theirs to establish. Framing it that way is usually more productive than asking for everything back, and it gets the document finished, which is the actual objective.
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Everything above runs outward. Documents also come the other way, and the structure mirrors.
A document issued abroad for use in India is authenticated in its own country by whatever its local chain requires, and then, if that country is not a party to the convention, legalised by the Indian mission there. If it is a party, an apostille issued by its competent authority is what India expects, and no Indian mission stamp should be required on top of it, for the same reason the reverse is true.
The commonest incoming documents we see are foreign marriage certificates, foreign degrees for employment or registration here, and powers of attorney executed abroad. A power of attorney coming into India raises stamping and registration questions in addition to authentication, and those are separate from anything on this page.
Where an incoming document is in another language, a translation will be needed and the sequence of translation and authentication matters, which is covered further down.
A power of attorney executed abroad is the awkward one. Coming into India it raises stamping and registration questions on top of authentication, and those are separate from anything on this page.
Four patterns, in descending order of how much they cost.
Running the wrong route because the destination's status was taken from an article rather than checked. That is the costly one, and it is getting commoner as the convention grows. Running the chain out of order, which produces a return at the second office rather than a wasted chain. Laminating the document, usually to protect it, which prevents further stamping. And starting the chain months before the document is needed, which collides with mission shelf-life requirements.
Notice that none of these is a mistake about the substance of the document. They are all process errors, and all four are prevented by the same thing: establishing the route and inspecting the document before anything is submitted.
There is a fifth pattern that is harder to classify and worth naming anyway: starting the chain without having asked the receiving institution what it wants. Clients assume the requirement from the job offer or the admission letter, both of which are often written in general terms, and discover at the end that the body wanted something slightly different — a verification at source rather than an attestation, or a document the applicant did not know was needed. One email at the start settles it.
To be explicit about what is deliberately absent, because the absences are the useful part of this page.
No list of member countries. It changes, and a stale list routes a reader into a closed office.
No mission fees. Every mission sets its own, in its own currency sometimes, and alters them without notice.
No per-office processing times. The offices do not publish them, so any figure is one person's experience of one counter.
No total cost. A total built from figures we have not verified is worse than no figure.
No shelf life. No Indian rule fixes how long a legalised document stays acceptable; where a limit exists the mission or the receiving institution sets it.
What we do print is the Ministry's own published charges, because the Ministry publishes them on its own site, and the dates of the two recent accessions, because the Hague Conference publishes those. Everything else on this subject that circulates as a tidy national figure traces back to an agency quoting its own package.
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Before any office is approached, the document itself has to survive inspection, and this is where files fail before they begin.
Was it actually registered? A birth that was never registered does not produce a certificate that can be attested, and no amount of process creates one. Was it issued by an authority the State recognises, with a seal and a signature the State holds specimens for? A certificate from an institution that is not on the relevant list is not going to clear the first office whatever its contents say.
Does the name on it match the passport of the person it relates to? Is the issuing seal legible, or has it faded to a grey smudge? Has anybody laminated it? Each of these is a question that takes thirty seconds and saves weeks.
Where the answer to one of them is unwelcome, the fix happens first and separately. A name mismatch on an educational document is an educational records correction, not an attestation problem.
Four questions, thirty seconds each, before anything is submitted. Was it actually registered? Is the issuing authority one the State recognises? Does the name match the passport? Is the seal legible and the document unlaminated? Every one of these costs weeks if asked later.
The first mark in the chain comes from the State, and the Ministry's role depends entirely on it. The Ministry attests the signature of a designated signing authority of a State Government, a Union Territory or a Chamber of Commerce, which means that if no such signature is on the document there is nothing for the Ministry to attest.
Which authority that is depends on the kind of document and on the State. The categories are settled; the specific office is local. That is why we establish the State route before anything is submitted rather than assuming it from how it worked in a different State last month.
A point worth making about sequence. People reasonably assume that the biggest office goes last and the smallest first, and that is roughly right, but it is not a hierarchy of importance. It is a hierarchy of who holds whose specimen signatures, which is a different thing and is why no step can be skipped on grounds of obviousness.
It is not a hierarchy of importance. It is a hierarchy of who holds whose specimen signatures — which is why the order is fixed and why no step can be skipped on grounds of obviousness.
Birth, death and marriage certificates, affidavits and similar personal documents are authenticated by the competent authority in the State concerned. In several States that is the Home Department; in several others the General Administration Department. A Sub-Divisional Magistrate route also exists and in some places is the normal one for personal documents.
The SDM route causes more confusion than any other part of this process, and it is worth being plain about why. It is a genuine route and documents pass through it routinely. But which documents it covers, and whether a particular State's mission-facing practice accepts it, is local. It does not stand in for the State department everywhere, and treating it as one is a common reason a file stalls one office later.
So we establish, for the specific State and the specific document, which office is the correct first mark, and we do that before the document leaves the client's hands.
The SDM route is real but local. It does not stand in for the State department everywhere, and treating it as one is a common reason a file clears one office and stalls at the next. Establish the correct first office for your State and your document before the document leaves your hands.
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Degrees, diplomas, marksheets and school certificates go through the education route rather than the home department route, and that route has an extra layer most people are not expecting.
The State education department will not usually authenticate a degree until the body that awarded it has confirmed the document back to them. That confirmation is a verification at source, it happens at the institution's own pace, and it is the single longest link in an educational attestation chain. Universities differ enormously in how quickly they respond, and nobody downstream can accelerate it.
This is also where attestation and verification get tangled. Many foreign employers and councils want both: the document authenticated through the chain, and separately verified directly with the university. Those are two different exercises with two different outputs, and a degree verification or a transcript request is not satisfied by an attestation, nor the reverse.
Commercial documents follow a third route. The Ministry's own description includes Chambers of Commerce among the bodies whose designated signatories it recognises, which is the statutory hook for this route.
In practice that means invoices, certificates of origin, incorporation documents, board resolutions and powers of attorney issued by a company are authenticated by a Chamber of Commerce before they reach the Ministry. The Chamber is in the same position relative to a company's documents that a State department is relative to a registrar's.
Two things tend to surprise businesses here. The Chamber will usually want evidence of the company and of the signatory's authority, not merely the document. And documents that accompany goods frequently travel on a tighter timetable than the chain comfortably allows, which is an argument for starting before the shipment rather than alongside it.
A notarised document and an authenticated document are not the same thing, and conflating them wastes a surprising amount of money.
A notary attests execution: that a person signed in front of them, or that a copy corresponds to an original they saw. That is useful and it is frequently a prerequisite, particularly for affidavits and for copies. What it is not is a link in the chain the Ministry recognises, because a notary is not a designated signing authority of a State Government, a Union Territory or a Chamber of Commerce.
So notary attestation is often step zero rather than step one. An affidavit has to be notarised before it can be authenticated; a certified true copy has to be made before anything can be done with a copy. But a notarised document taken straight to the Ministry is a document that has skipped a link.
A notary is step zero, not step one. Necessary for affidavits and copies; not a link the Ministry recognises, because a notary is not a designated signing authority of a State, a Union Territory or a Chamber of Commerce.
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The Ministry states that it does not legalise photocopies. What travels is the original, or a true copy made in the manner the process requires, and this is the point at which most clients become visibly uncomfortable.
The discomfort is reasonable. A single original degree certificate, issued once, travelling through three offices and a courier between each, is a genuine risk and we treat it as one. The document is tracked at every stage, it is never sent without a record of what went and when, and we do not take an original from a client without saying plainly what the risk is.
Where the process permits a true copy, that is preferable and we will say so. Where it does not, the question is whether a replacement could be obtained if the worst happened, and that question is worth asking before the document is handed over rather than afterwards. For some certificates a duplicate is routine; for others it is not.
Ask one question before you part with an original: could this be replaced? For some certificates the answer is yes and routine. For a degree from an institution that has closed, or an old certificate from a small office, it may be no, and that changes how the file should be run.
Narrower than it looks, and the narrowness is deliberate.
The State authority is confirming that the signature and seal on the document belong to an officer of an authority it recognises, and that they are genuine. It is not confirming that the certificate is accurate, that the person named exists, or that the facts recorded are true. It holds the specimen signature; that is the entirety of what it can speak to.
This matters because clients sometimes expect the first office to catch a problem in the document, and are then surprised when a problem surfaces at the mission or, worse, at the receiving institution abroad. The chain is not a sequence of quality checks. It is a sequence of signature confirmations, and a document can pass every link and still be wrong on its face.
The second link is the Ministry of External Affairs, and it is the link most people picture when they imagine this process. It is also the link they most often misunderstand, because the Ministry has not handled documents across a counter for well over a decade.
What the Ministry does is narrow and it is the hinge of the whole chain. Every foreign mission in Delhi holds the Ministry's specimen signatures; no foreign mission holds the specimen signatures of a district registrar in Punjab. So the Ministry's mark is the thing that converts a document the mission cannot assess into a document it can.
That is why the Ministry step cannot be skipped even where a mission seems willing, and why a document that goes to a mission without it comes back. The mission is not being difficult; it has nothing it can recognise.
On the Ministry's own account, its New Delhi counter stopped taking documents from members of the public in July 2012. That is a long time, and it is the source of a great deal of wasted travel.
People still arrive at the Ministry with documents, having been told by somebody that this is where it happens. It is where it happens in the sense that the mark comes from there. It is not where you go. Applications are made through one of four outsourced service providers, and the Ministry's own material cautions applicants against unauthorised persons and touts, which tells you what the counter used to look like.
The submission itself is specific: the original or a true copy, together with a photocopy of the document and a photocopy of the applicant's passport. The passport copy is the identity anchor for the whole file, which is why a name mismatch between document and passport is a problem at this step rather than a cosmetic one.
Nobody walks into the Ministry with a certificate. That has not been the process since 2012. If anybody tells you they can hand your document in personally there, they are describing something that does not happen.
Submission runs through one of four outsourced service providers. They are the channel, not a decision-maker: they receive, scan, forward and return. The attestation decision stays with the Ministry.
This distinction matters when something goes wrong, because clients tend to argue with whoever they can reach, and the provider is reachable while the Ministry is not. If a document is returned, the provider is relaying a decision rather than making one, and pressing them produces nothing. What produces something is fixing whatever the return identified.
It also matters for charges. The provider charges its own service fee, which the Ministry publishes alongside its own, and those are two separate numbers for two separate things.
A practical note about dealing with them. The provider's staff see a very high volume of files and are generally accurate about what a submission needs, because they handle the same rejections repeatedly. Where their counter advice conflicts with something you have read, their advice is usually the better guide to what will be accepted on the day. What they cannot do is tell you whether your route is right, because that question was settled before the document reached them.
It is also worth keeping the provider's acknowledgement rather than discarding it. It is the record of what was submitted and when, and if a document goes missing between stages it is the only document that establishes the file existed.
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Since 1 January 2019 the service has been decentralised to Branch Secretariats and Regional Passport Offices in fifteen cities, which was a genuine improvement for anybody outside Delhi. The Ministry also records that NORKA ROOTS is authorised to submit documents through the Thiruvananthapuram Regional Passport Office.
The practical effect is that a document from a State with a Branch Secretariat does not have to travel to Delhi for the Ministry step, which removes a courier leg in each direction and the days attached to it.
It does not change anything else. The pre-authentication still has to come from the right State authority, the document still cannot be a photocopy, and the mission step still happens where the mission is, which for most countries means Delhi regardless of where the Ministry mark was obtained. So decentralisation shortens one leg of the journey rather than the journey.
Decentralisation shortens one leg, not the journey. The pre-authentication still comes from the right State authority, the document still cannot be a photocopy, and the mission step still happens where the mission is.
The Ministry publishes its charges on its own site, and because it publishes them we will repeat them. At the time of writing it states a charge of fifty rupees per apostille. It states that normal attestation is free of charge. And it states that the outsourced agencies charge ninety rupees per document as a service charge, plus three rupees per page as a scanning charge.
Those are the only attestation figures on this page, and they are here because they come from the Ministry rather than from an agency's price list.
Read them against what people are usually quoted and the gap is the point of the next few sections. The Indian half of this process is not where the money goes.
e-Sanad is the Ministry's online service for verification and attestation of documents of Indian citizens. Where a document and its issuing authority are connected to it, part of the verification happens digitally rather than by physical movement of paper.
That is a real simplification where it applies, and the reason it has not swept the field is coverage. It depends on the issuing authority being onboarded, which varies by State, by university and by document type. The Ministry's material is explicit that documents outside it follow the ordinary authentication, deposition and collection steps.
So the sensible approach is to check rather than assume in either direction. Assuming e-Sanad covers your document and planning a short timeline around it is a mistake; assuming it does not, and running a full physical chain for a document that could have gone digitally, is an avoidable cost. It is one of the things we establish before quoting.
The Ministry uses normal attestation for the route that is not the apostille route, and describes it as applying to countries which are not members of the Hague Convention, or where the apostille is not accepted.
That second limb is worth noticing. It contemplates a case where a country is a member but the apostille is nonetheless not accepted, which happens where a State has objected to an accession, so that the convention does not come into force between those two particular States even though both are parties.
It is uncommon and it is the kind of thing that catches a reader who has checked the status table and stopped there. The table records the parties; it also records objections, and the question is always whether the convention is in force between India and the destination, not whether both appear on the list.
Being on the list is not the test. The question is whether the convention is in force between India and that country. A State can object to an accession, and the status table records objections as well as parties.
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Nothing, on the Ministry's own account. Normal attestation is free of charge.
That deserves a sentence of its own because of the number of people who have been told otherwise, and because of what it implies for any quoted package. If a service quotes a single all-in figure for embassy attestation and the Ministry's own step within it is free, then the figure is composed of the agency charge, the State charge, the mission fee, courier, and the service's own margin. Those are legitimate costs. But a client is entitled to know which is which, and a quote that will not break down is a quote that is hiding one of them.
We are not pretending this is disinterested advice. We charge for this work and the charge is stated on this page. What we are saying is that the charge is for running the file, not for a stamp, and that anybody implying the government fees are the bulk of it is describing something that is not true.
The last link follows the same logic as the first two, and clients consistently expect more of it than it does.
The consular officer is confirming that the Ministry's mark is genuine. They hold the Ministry's specimen signatures; that is what they can speak to. They are not assessing your degree, your marriage or your employability, and they are not making any statement about the contents of the document.
What this means in practice is that a mission's rejection is almost never about the substance. It is about the chain: a missing link, an unrecognised mark, a document that has been altered or laminated, or a requirement of that particular mission that was not met. Reading a rejection as a judgement on the document sends people looking for the wrong fix.
It also explains something clients find counter-intuitive, which is that a mission will legalise a document it has no view about and might privately doubt. The officer's function is not to form a view. If the Ministry mark is genuine and the mission's own requirements are met, the legalisation follows, and any question about the substance of the document belongs to whoever receives it abroad.
The corollary is the one to carry away. A legalised document proves its own provenance and nothing else. Presenting it as though a government has endorsed its contents is a misreading, and an institution that relies on it that way has misread it too.
What actually appears on the document varies, and the variation causes needless anxiety.
Some marks are adhesive stickers carrying a serial number and a barcode. Some are wet stamps with a signature across them. Some missions emboss. A fully legalised document frequently carries three or four of these in different formats, sometimes on the reverse, sometimes on an attached sheet.
Two practical consequences. First, physical space matters: a document with no clear margin can run out of room, and some missions will attach a sheet rather than crowd the page. Second, nothing may be applied over a mark. This is the mechanical reason lamination is fatal, and the reason staples should not be removed and replaced, because a second set of holes suggests something was taken out.
When a document comes back to us we photograph every mark before it goes to the client, so that there is a record of what was on it and in what condition.
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With the Ministry's mark in place the document goes to the embassy, consulate or high commission of the destination country in India. This is the step over which Indian law has nothing to say.
Everything about it belongs to the mission: whether an appointment is required, whether a representative can submit on an applicant's behalf, what supporting documents accompany the submission, what it charges, how it charges, how long it takes, and whether it will accept the document at all. A mission can decline for reasons that have nothing to do with the chain, and there is no appeal from that to any Indian authority.
It is also, on most routes, where the real money and the real time sit. The Indian half can be done for a few hundred rupees in government charges; a mission fee can be several thousand and some are considerably more. Any quoted package that does not identify the mission fee separately is averaging across missions.
Within a single city, two missions handling the same kind of document can want different things, and this is the part of the process that cannot be systematised.
Some require the applicant in person. Some accept submissions only through a named agency. Some require a covering letter from an employer or institution in the destination country, which means the applicant must obtain something from abroad before the Indian chain can complete. Some require the document to have been attested within a stated recent period. Some require a translation, and some require the translation to have travelled through the chain itself.
None of this is published in a single place and none of it is stable. So the honest statement is that the mission's current requirements are established at the time, for that mission, and that any page claiming to list them for every mission is listing what was true for some of them at some point.
Some missions want something from the destination country first — a covering letter from the employer or institution abroad. That turns the Indian chain into something that cannot complete until a foreign party acts, which is worth discovering in week one.
Where the destination works in another language, a translation will usually be required, and the question that catches people is not whether but when.
If the translation must itself be authenticated, it has to exist before the chain runs, because it travels through the chain alongside or attached to the original. Preparing a translation after the document comes back legalised, when the mission expected the translation to carry the marks too, means running the chain again for the translation.
Missions also differ on who may translate. Some accept any competent translator with a declaration; some require a translator on their own list; some require the translation to be notarised first. These are mission-specific and they are asked about rather than assumed. Where a translation is required we arrange it as a legal translation, and the sequencing question is settled before anything is submitted.
The question is not whether, it is when. If the translation must itself be authenticated, it has to exist before the chain runs. Prepared afterwards, it means running the chain a second time for the translation.
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We have given the Ministry's charges because the Ministry publishes them. For everything else there is no honest figure to give, and it is worth being specific about why rather than simply declining.
State authority charges differ by State and by document, and several States revise them without announcement. Mission fees are set by each mission, sometimes denominated in the mission's own currency with a conversion applied on the day, and changed at the mission's convenience. Courier costs depend on distance and on how many legs the document travels.
So a national total for embassy attestation does not exist as a fact about the world. Where you see one, it is a service's package price, which is a legitimate thing to quote but is not the same as the cost of the process. The way to find out what yours will cost is to ask each office when you reach it, and to require any service to break its quote down so the mission fee is named on its own.
Ask any service to name the mission fee separately. A quote that will not break down is a quote in which the mission fee is a guess, a margin, or both.
We give an elapsed period for the whole exercise and we do not break it into per-office days, and the reason is the same as for fees: the offices do not publish those figures, so any number offered is one person's experience of one counter on one occasion.
What can be said is which links are variable and which are fairly stable. The Ministry step is comparatively predictable. The State step varies by State. The educational route is the least predictable of all, because it waits on a university's own verification and universities differ enormously. The mission step varies by mission and can be slow in ways nobody can forecast.
So the honest shape of an answer is a range for the whole thing, with the warning that the two unpredictable links are the university and the mission, and that neither can be hurried by anybody.
Which links are predictable. The Ministry step is comparatively stable. The State step varies by State. The educational route is the least predictable, because it waits on a university. The mission step varies by mission and cannot be forecast.
Even if every office's processing time were known, adding them would understate the total, and the gap is where client frustration lives.
Between each pair of offices the document physically travels, and travel adds days in each direction. Offices have intake windows and collection windows that do not align. A file that misses a Friday intake waits for Monday, and a file returned for a correction loses not just the correction time but its place in the next queue.
This is also why a file that is right at the first presentation is dramatically faster than one that is nearly right. The cost of a rejection is not the time taken to fix the defect; it is the time taken to fix it plus a full re-entry into a queue, at every subsequent office.
The only real accelerant is a correct first submission. Nobody can speed up a counter. What a well-prepared file avoids is the re-queueing that follows a return, and on a three-office chain that is where the weeks go.
In our files the failures cluster, and they cluster early.
Two of those clusters are worth separating out because they behave differently. A failure before submission costs the whole chain, because nothing has been built yet and everything that follows rests on the defect. A failure at the mission costs the mission step and the time to re-present, but the Indian marks survive. So the expensive failures are at the start and the recoverable ones at the end, which is the reverse of how people allocate their attention.
Before submission — wrong route for the destination, document never registered, name mismatch, lamination. The expensive ones, and all four are preventable by inspection.
At the State office — wrong office for that document type, or an issuing seal the office does not recognise.
At the Ministry — missing pre-authentication, a photocopy, or a passport copy that does not match the document.
At the mission — a mission-specific requirement nobody asked about, a document too old for that mission's limit, or a translation prepared at the wrong point.
The pattern is that the earlier the error, the more it costs, the reverse of what most people assume, and the reason we spend the first conversation on inspection rather than on logistics.
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A name that differs between the document and the passport is the commonest single defect, and it is almost always innocent: an expanded initial, a surname added after marriage, a spelling the school used, a middle name that appears in one place and not the other.
It still has to be dealt with before the chain starts. Every office checks the file against the passport copy, so a mismatch is caught repeatedly rather than once, and hoping it will pass is hoping four separate offices will each overlook the same thing.
The fix depends on the document. Sometimes it is a correction at source. Sometimes an affidavit declaring the two names to be one person, which then has to be notarised and travel through the chain itself, which lengthens the exercise but resolves it. Whether it is one or the other turns on the issuing authority rather than on anything in the chain, and it is settled first.
Every office checks against the same passport copy. So a mismatch is caught four times rather than once, and hoping it will pass is hoping four separate officers each overlook the same thing.
Occasionally the problem is more fundamental: the event happened but was never registered, so there is no certificate to attest.
Births and marriages from some decades and some places were simply not registered at the time, and families discover this when a document is needed abroad. Attestation has nothing to offer here. The chain authenticates signatures on an existing record; it cannot create the record.
What follows is a registration exercise, which depends on the event and on how long ago it was, and which can involve a court or a magistrate for a delayed registration. That work comes first and it is not part of this page. The useful thing to know at the outset is simply that it is a separate problem needing a separate answer, so that months are not spent approaching it as an attestation question.
Attestation cannot create a record. Where a birth or marriage was never registered, the first exercise is registration — sometimes a delayed registration before a magistrate — and it is a separate problem needing a separate answer.
An illegible seal stops a chain at the first office, and it stops it for a reason that is not fixable downstream.
The State authority is matching the seal and signature against specimens it holds. If the seal has faded, was applied badly, or has been photocopied into grey, there is nothing to match. The officer is not being obstructive; they genuinely cannot perform the only function they have.
The remedy is to go back to the issuing authority for a fresh copy with a clear seal, which for most offices is routine. The remedy that does not work, and that people attempt, is to darken or trace over the seal, which converts an unreadable document into an altered one. Where there is doubt about whether a document will be recognised, confirming it against the issuing office first is a document verification step and it is cheaper than a returned file.
Never darken or trace over a faded seal. It converts an unreadable document into an altered one. Go back to the issuing office for a fresh copy, which is routine almost everywhere.
Three physical habits, all well-intentioned, all damaging.
Lamination is the worst. It protects the document and it prevents anything further being applied to it, and some missions treat a laminated document as one that cannot be verified because the surface cannot be examined. A laminated certificate usually has to be replaced rather than rescued.
Staples matter because of what removing them suggests. A multi-page document that arrives with a second set of holes raises the question of whether a page was taken out, and nobody downstream can answer it. If pages must be separated, that is a decision for the office handling them.
And nothing should be written on the document. Not a reference number in the margin, not a tick, not a correction. Marks made by anybody other than an issuing or attesting authority are, from the point of view of the next office, alterations of unknown origin.
Do not laminate, do not re-staple, do not write on it. All three are done to help. All three can end the document's usefulness, and lamination usually cannot be undone.
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Mission rejections, in our experience, fall into four kinds, and only one of them is about the document.
The chain is incomplete or carries a mark the mission does not recognise. A mission-specific requirement was not met, which covers covering letters, prescribed forms, appointment procedures and submission through a named channel. The document is older than the mission's limit. Or the document itself is physically unacceptable, meaning altered, laminated or illegible.
What is conspicuously not on that list is any assessment of the document's contents, for the reason given earlier: the consular officer is not examining your degree.
Which is useful when a rejection arrives, because it narrows the diagnosis. The question is never what is wrong with the certificate. It is which of those four applied, and that is a question the mission will usually answer if asked directly.
Four kinds of mission rejection, and only one is about the document. An incomplete or unrecognised chain. A mission-specific requirement not met. A document older than that mission’s limit. Or a document physically unacceptable — altered, laminated, illegible. Nothing on that list is an assessment of the contents.
Find out the reason in writing before doing anything else. A verbal reason at a counter, relayed through two people, is how files end up being corrected for the wrong defect.
Then establish how far back the fix reaches. A mission-specific requirement that was missed usually means resubmitting to the mission with the missing item. An unrecognised earlier mark means going back to the office that made it. A physical defect in the document usually means a fresh document and the whole chain again.
What does not help is resubmitting the same file in the hope of a different officer. Missions keep records of submissions, and a file resubmitted unchanged is a file that invites a closer look rather than a kinder one.
It is also worth asking whether the rejection is specific to that mission's requirements or goes to the document. The distinction decides whether anything can be salvaged. A missing covering letter is a half-day problem. A document the mission regards as altered is usually a fresh document and a fresh chain, and being told that clearly on day one is better than three weeks of attempts.
Where a file has been run by somebody else and comes to us after a rejection, the first thing we do is establish which marks are genuinely on the document and in what condition, because a rejected file has often been handled a great deal and the physical state of the paper is part of the diagnosis.
Do not resubmit the same file hoping for a different officer. Missions keep records of submissions, and an unchanged resubmission invites a closer look rather than a kinder one.
How long does a legalised document stay good? There is no Indian answer, and the absence of an answer is itself the answer.
No Indian rule fixes a period after which an attestation lapses. The marks do not expire of their own force. What happens instead is that the body receiving the document imposes a limit, and that limit is theirs rather than anybody's law.
So when somebody says an attestation is valid for six months, the right question is whose six months. If it is the receiving institution's rule, it governs that application. If it is a mission's rule about how recently a document must have been attested before it will legalise it, it governs that submission. And if it is nobody's rule, it is a thing somebody read on a website.
The practical handling is simple once the source of the limit is identified. Ask the receiving institution whether it imposes one, and ask the mission whether it requires the Ministry mark to be recent. Those two answers tell you both whether there is a clock and when it starts. In the absence of either, the document does not go stale, and a legalised certificate from three years ago is as good as one from last week unless somebody says otherwise.
The mission version of this is worth isolating because it affects sequencing rather than planning.
Where a mission requires that the Ministry attestation be recent, the Indian half of the chain cannot be completed far in advance of the mission step. A client who efficiently gets the State and Ministry marks months before they need the document, intending to approach the mission later, can find the earlier marks are now too old for that mission.
This cuts directly against the instinct to get things done early, and it is a rare case where moving early makes things worse. Where a mission imposes such a limit, the chain is run as a continuous exercise rather than in stages separated by months, and the date of the Ministry mark is noted so that the remaining window is known.
Getting ahead can cost you. Where a mission requires a recent attestation, Indian marks obtained months in advance may be too old by the time the document reaches the mission. Find out before you start, not after.
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A short list, and we would rather state it at the first conversation than discover it in the third week.
A document we have reason to believe is not genuine. A document presented in a name other than the one it was issued in, where the difference is being managed rather than resolved. A document whose purpose, as described to us, does not match what the document is. And any file where the client wants an office approached in a way that is not the way it is approached.
We also decline where the underlying document has a defect the client does not want to fix. Sending a laminated certificate or one with an illegible seal into the chain, knowing it will come back, is billing somebody for a predictable failure.
None of this is common. Most attestation work is entirely ordinary and the client simply wants their degree to be usable in another country. But the list exists and it is applied.
We also decline a predictable failure. Sending a laminated certificate or one with an illegible seal into the chain, knowing it will come back, is billing somebody for a result we can already see.
The work is logistics and record-keeping rather than drafting, and the value is almost entirely in it being done attentively.
The route, in writing — the destination's convention position on the relevant date, the pre-authentication category, and the offices in order.
The inspection note — registration confirmed, name against passport, seal legibility, physical condition.
The submission sets — original or true copy, document photocopy, passport photocopy, prepared for each stage's requirements.
A movement record — what went where, on what date, and what came back.
A photograph of every mark on collection, before the document leaves us.
The dates that matter afterwards — principally the date of the Ministry mark, where a mission imposes a limit on how recent it must be.
Where a client has many documents, keeping that record navigable becomes its own file management job, and on a family relocating with twenty certificates it is the difference between a process and a mess.
Worth stating plainly, because the opposite is implied by a great deal of advertising in this field.
We cannot accelerate any government office or any mission. We cannot obtain an appointment that is not available. We cannot influence whether a university responds to a verification request, or when. We cannot predict a mission fee or a mission's processing time. And we cannot guarantee that a mission will accept a document, because that decision is the mission's alone and is not subject to anything we can do.
What we can do is get the file right at the first presentation, that it is tracked so that you know where it is, and that when something is returned you are told why within the day rather than told that it is in process.
Anybody promising more than that on this particular service is promising something that is not in their gift.
Nobody private can accelerate a government counter or a mission. Any promise of a guaranteed date, a faster queue or a certain outcome on this service is a promise about something outside the promisor’s control.
Some things cannot be delegated and it is better to know which at the start.
A few missions require the applicant to appear personally, and no authorisation changes that. An affidavit in the file has to be sworn by the deponent in person. Where a document has to be obtained or corrected at source, some issuing authorities deal only with the person concerned or a close relative. And where a passport itself needs attention before the file can proceed, that is the applicant's own process, dealt with on our passport renewal page.
For applicants already abroad this is the hard part, and it is worth identifying early because the answer may be that the document has to be handled on a visit home, or through a family member with the right authority, rather than remotely.
For applicants already abroad this is the hard part. Identify the in-person steps first — the answer may be that the file waits for a visit home, or needs a family member with the right authority.
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Things that travel alongside an attestation file. The apostille route, where the destination is inside the convention — the alternative to everything on this page. Legal translation, where the destination works in another language and the translation may have to travel through the chain itself. Degree verification and transcripts, which are verification at source rather than attestation and are frequently wanted in addition. Credential evaluation and equivalence, where a foreign body needs to understand an Indian qualification rather than merely trust it. Where it is a copy or an affidavit that travels rather than the original, a certified true copy or notary attestation comes first. And the attestation work itself is the embassy attestation service on this page.
One question, asked of the right person, decides whether any of this applies to you: is the country where the document will be produced a party to the 1961 Convention on the date you will produce it.
Ask the institution that wants the document, in writing, what it requires. A university admissions office, an employer's HR department, a foreign ministry or a licensing body will tell you whether it wants an apostille or a legalised document, and that answer is worth more than any general advice because it is the answer of the body that will accept or reject the paper.
Then confirm the convention position independently against the status table maintained by the Hague Conference, which is where accessions and entry-into-force dates are published. Those two answers together take an afternoon and they prevent the most expensive mistake available here, which is completing a chain that the destination will not look at.
Two emails, no cost. One to whoever will be handed the document at the other end, asking in writing what it requires. One check of the convention status table for the destination, with today's date in mind. Everything on this page follows from those two answers.
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We do not issue the document. If the certificate itself is wrong, missing, or was never registered, that is a different exercise entirely and it happens before anything on this page. A birth certificate that was never registered cannot be attested into existence, and a marriage certificate with a misspelt name has to be corrected at source.
We do not attest anything ourselves, and neither does anybody who tells you they can. Every stamp in the chain is applied by a government office or by a foreign mission. What a service does is prepare, present, track and collect. Anybody describing themselves as able to attest your document is describing something that does not exist.
We do not advise on immigration or on whether a document will satisfy a visa requirement. That is a question for the mission or for an immigration adviser, and when it goes wrong the person who carries it is the applicant, not us. Where a document is being prepared for a visa, the visa documentation side is a separate conversation.
Nobody private can attest a document. Every mark in the chain comes from a State authority, the Ministry or a foreign mission. A service prepares and presents; it does not stamp. Treat any other claim as a reason to walk away.
Our charge for running an attestation file is ₹4,500, and the usual elapsed period is 10 – 20 days, most of which is waiting rather than working. It covers establishing the route for your destination, identifying which pre-authentication applies to your document, preparing and presenting the file at each stage, tracking it, collecting it, and telling you where it is when you ask.
Outside it are the government and mission charges, which are paid to them and not to us: the State authority's charge where one applies, the Ministry's charge, the service provider's charge, and the mission's own fee, which differs by mission and is the largest of them on many routes. Courier and translation are also outside, as is anything needed to obtain or correct the underlying document.
What you get from us. A written route for your specific document and destination, with the stages named in order. The file presented and tracked at each stage. The document back, with every mark intact and nothing laminated. A note of which marks are on it and what each one certifies. And, where a mission imposes a currency on the document's age, a note of the date the clock started.
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The Ministry publishes its own charges and we will repeat what it publishes: at the time of writing, its own page states a charge of fifty rupees per apostille, states that normal attestation is free of charge, and states that the outsourced agencies charge ninety rupees per document as a service fee plus three rupees per page for scanning. Those are the Ministry's figures on the Ministry's own site, and they are the only attestation figures on this page.
Everything else is deliberately absent. We do not print mission fees, because every mission sets its own and changes them. We do not print State authority charges, because they differ by State. We do not print a total, because a total made of figures we have not verified is worse than no figure at all.
And we will say plainly why this matters. The attestation business is full of published fee tables that are nobody's official rate, and a reader who plans around one of them is planning around a number somebody invented. Ask each office what it charges, at the time you reach it.
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Find out, in writing, what the receiving institution actually wants, and find out where the destination country stands under the 1961 Convention on the date your document will be produced there.
Those two facts decide everything else on this page, and both can shift. An institution's requirements change. A country's position under the convention changes, and it has changed for two significant destinations within the last year. A route worked out from an article written eighteen months ago is a route worked out against a map that has moved.
If you are sending documents for a job, a course or a marriage abroad, do this before you start collecting certificates rather than after. The order in which the chain is done cannot be rearranged, and a document that has gone through the wrong chain has to go through the right one from the beginning.
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Tell us the document, the destination country and what the receiving institution has asked for in writing. You will get the route in order, with the offices named, before anything is submitted.
The framework. Legalisation is the older of the two systems for making a document issued in one country usable in another, and it survives wherever the Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents does not apply between the two States concerned. Where the convention does apply, an apostille replaces legalisation and the embassy route is not available; where it does not, the chain of authentications ending at the destination country's mission is the only route. India has been a party since 2005. The apostille side — what the certificate attests, the exclusions, the allonge and how an apostille is verified — is set out on our apostille page rather than repeated here.
Two accessions have moved the boundary, and both are recent. According to the Hague Conference on Private International Law, Viet Nam deposited its instrument of accession on 31 December 2025 and the convention entered into force for Viet Nam on 11 September 2026. Thailand deposited its instrument of accession on 30 June 2026 and the convention will enter into force for Thailand on 28 February 2027; with that accession the convention had 130 Contracting Parties. The practical consequence differs between the two because of the dates: the embassy route for Viet Nam has already closed, while for Thailand it remains the route until the end of February 2027. Readers should check the HCCH status table for the position of their own destination on the date the document will be produced, rather than relying on any list printed in an article.
What the Ministry of External Affairs says about its own process. The Ministry legalises documents on the basis of the signatures of designated signing authorities of State Governments, Union Territories and Chambers of Commerce, and it does not verify the contents of the document. Since July 2012 the New Delhi counter has not taken documents from members of the public; applications are made through one of four outsourced service providers, submitting the original or a true copy together with a photocopy of the document and a photocopy of the applicant's passport. The Ministry does not legalise photocopies. Since 1 January 2019 the service has been decentralised to Branch Secretariats and Regional Passport Offices in fifteen cities, and NORKA ROOTS is authorised to submit documents through the Thiruvananthapuram Regional Passport Office. e-Sanad is the Ministry's online service for verification and attestation of documents of Indian citizens, covering certain documents; documents outside it follow the ordinary authentication, deposition and collection steps. The Ministry also cautions applicants against unauthorised persons and touts.
The Ministry's published charges. On its own page the Ministry states a charge of fifty rupees per apostille, that normal attestation is free of charge, and that the outsourced agencies charge ninety rupees per document as a service charge plus three rupees per page as a scanning charge. Those are the only attestation figures stated on this page, and they are stated because they are the Ministry's own and are published by it. No mission fee, no State authority charge and no total is given, because those are set by many different bodies, change independently, and the tidy national totals circulating online trace back to agencies quoting their own packages.
Where the convention does not apply, the route is normal attestation followed by the mission. The Ministry describes normal attestation as applying to countries which are not members of the Hague Convention or where the apostille is not accepted. The document is first authenticated by the competent authority in the State concerned, then attested by the Ministry, and then presented to the embassy, consulate or high commission of the destination country in India for its own legalisation. Each mission applies its own requirements, its own fee schedule and its own processing time, and none of those is set by Indian law.
Three things this page refuses to state. There is no list of convention member countries, because the list changes and a stale list sends a reader down a route that has closed. There is no table of mission fees or processing times, because each mission sets its own and alters them without notice. And there is no statement of how long a legalised document remains acceptable, because no Indian rule fixes that; where a shelf life exists it is imposed by the receiving institution or the mission, and it has to be asked about rather than assumed.
What sits on other pages. The apostille route in full, including what the certificate attests and the exclusions that catch commercial documents, is on our apostille assistance page. Translation of a document into the destination language, and when the translation itself needs to travel through the chain, is dealt with on the legal translation page. Verification of degrees and transcripts at source, which is a separate exercise from attestation and is sometimes required alongside it, has pages of its own. Each is referred to here rather than reproduced.
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