Consider a scenario – You are travelling from India to some other country (of course you are travelling) and you have some documents which are issued in India, document such as Degree, Birth certificate, Marriage certificate, Company issued certificate etc and you want to use these documents in other country, in order to make sure that these are legal document and are issued from a registered organization the other country will ask you to get MEA apostille from your country.

To make the documents issued in one country legal in other countries and to make the whole process easier  113 countries got together and formed convention called Hague nation convention where government  of one country will legalize its documents to other countries so that it can be used in other country without any issues.The sticker provided by MEA is called apostille.

There are two types of Apostille

1. • More time consuming one (state attestation)

For example birth certificate attestation-
You need to visit secretariat of your region and submit your documents in turn they will send your document to registrar of births and deaths from them it will be confirmed that this is a legal document, and the document will be returned back to secretariat, finally secretariat will put a seal stating MEA that this is legal and issued from this region and this state.

After getting the state attestation this document needs to be sent to MEA for final apostille. This is where we enter the picture, Since 2012 government of India (MEA) has outsourced this collection and distribution of documents to us since there were thousands of documents which the government couldn’t keep up with.

This MEA apostille procedure we will handle the rest. MEA will not accept direct submission of documents by citizens.

This whole process will take 30 working days since lot of government bodies are involved.

• • • Less time consuming one (SDM attestation )

In this kind of apostille all you need to do is submit the documents and we will take care of everything.

Apostille will be valid for 6 months. If the Apostille is beyond 6 months it needs to be reapplied.

Check whether your destination country is in the hague nation list (except Italy and Austria ) then SDM is fine for you.
If the documents are issued in Punjab , Haryana and Goa or you want MEA Apostille for countries other than Hague nations, then you may need state attestation.

• Original document that you want to Apostille 
• Passport photocopies of the person whose name is mentioned in the document

Example: If an affidavit mentions 10 names we need all 10 people passport photocopies.