Arya Samaj Mandir and Arya Samaj Marriage in Rajouri Garden, West Delhi

1. A three-day wedding, and the one moment that is the marriage

Rajouri Garden is wedding country. Banquet halls along the Ring Road, the markets that supply half of West Delhi, and a locality so associated with the business that Band Baaja Baaraat was shot here. Families from this belt do not have a wedding; they have a season — roka, sagai, chooda, mehndi, sangeet, milni, varmala, pheras, vidai, reception.

What that actually settles

• Everything before the pheras creates no marriage at all. A roka, a sagai, an exchange of rings, a date fixed by the pandit, a jaimala in front of five hundred people — none of them makes two people married, and a broken engagement needs no divorce.
• Everything after the pheras changes nothing legally. The reception, the vidai, the honeymoon — you were already married before any of it.
• The guest count is irrelevant. Five hundred people at the jaimala and four at the pheras makes no difference either way. A marriage with six people present is exactly as valid as one with six hundred.
• And the money is irrelevant too. Nothing in section 5 or section 7 mentions a venue, a budget, a band, a baraat, clothing, cards or a caterer.

2. Which date goes on the certificate — and why families get it wrong

This is a small point that causes a disproportionate amount of trouble, and almost nobody warns about it.

The midnight problem

In a great many Punjabi weddings the baraat arrives in the evening, the jaimala happens at nine or ten, dinner runs for two hours, and the pheras begin after midnight. Families then put the card’s date on everything.

• If the saptapadi was completed at 1.30 a.m. on the night of the 14th, the date of marriage is the 15th. The calendar does not care that the card said the 14th.
• Get it right once, at the start. The same date must appear on the pandit’s or institution’s certificate, on both affidavits, on the application form and on the government certificate. A mismatch between the affidavit and the certificate is a returned file.
• It also starts your clock. Delhi requires registration within sixty days of the marriage, and that is sixty days from the true date.
• And it is the anniversary you will state for the rest of your life — on passports, on pension forms, on visa files. It is worth five minutes of care.

3. What to do at a banquet-hall wedding — the five things

A professional photographer will shoot four thousand frames and may not have a single clear one of the seventh step. A wedding planner will manage everything except the only piece of paper that matters. So somebody in the family has to own this list, and it takes about fifteen minutes in total.

1. Tell the photographer, in advance and in writing, to cover the pheras and the saptapadi specifically. Clear frames of the couple at the fire and taking the seven steps, with faces visible. Not the stage, not the jaimala, not the sangeet. Put it in the brief with the rest of the shot-list.
2. Take the pandit’s details on the day. Full name, father's name, full address, telephone number, and a short signed statement that he solemnised the marriage on that date at that place, describing the rites performed and expressly naming the saptapadi. A banquet-hall pandit is usually booked through the hall or the planner and may be very hard to trace a year later.
3. Note the actual completion time of the seventh step and settle the date (section 2).
4. Write down two witnesses who were present at the pheras — not at the reception — with full names, addresses and telephone numbers. Choose the most locatable people, not the most senior ones.
5. Keep the invitation card, and photograph everything and email it to yourself within the week. Albums are delivered months later, photographers change studios, and hard drives fail.

4. The destination wedding — Jaipur, Goa, Rishikesh, Dubai

A fair number of Rajouri Garden weddings do not happen in Rajouri Garden. The budget that once went on a banquet hall on Ring Road now goes on a palace hotel outside Jaipur, a beach resort in Goa, a riverside property at Rishikesh, or a four-day event in Dubai or Bangkok. The couple comes back to West Delhi afterwards and asks the question nobody answered in the planning file: where do we register?

The answer is simpler than people fear, and it turns on a single idea. Section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act 1955 names no venue. It provides that a Hindu marriage may be solemnised in accordance with the customary rites and ceremonies of either party, and that where those rites include the saptapadi the marriage becomes complete and binding when the seventh step is taken. A hotel lawn in Rajasthan is as good a place to take the seventh step as a mandir in Delhi. The marriage is valid the moment the rites are complete, wherever on the map that happens.

Registration is the separate question, and it is a question about which office, not whether.

Married inside India, at another state's venue

Delhi's compulsory registration regime reaches marriages where the parties reside in Delhi. Where the ceremony happened in Jaipur, Udaipur, Goa or Rishikesh and both of you live in West Delhi, the ordinary course is to register in Delhi on the basis of residence, with the venue named as the place of solemnisation in both affidavits. That is also why the affidavits matter more for a destination wedding than for a local one: they are the document that tells the registering authority what happened, where, and on what date.

The alternative — registering in the state where the ceremony was held — is lawful too, under the registration rules of that state, but for most Delhi couples it means a second trip for the appointment and a third if something is short. Unless one of you genuinely lives in that state, Delhi is the practical answer.

Married abroad

Here the ground changes, and the honest answer has an “it depends” in it.

If the ceremony abroad was a Hindu ceremony performed with the customary rites including the saptapadi, the marriage is a Hindu marriage; but the Hindu Marriage Act's own reach is set by section 1(2), which extends it to the whole of India, and to Hindus domiciled in India who are outside India. Delhi's registration machinery is comfortable with a marriage solemnised in Delhi or by Delhi residents; it is less comfortable with one solemnised in Dubai. Some couples register at the Indian Mission in the country concerned under the Special Marriage Act 1954, which has its own provisions for marriages of Indian citizens abroad. Others hold a short second ceremony in Delhi after returning and register that, which is lawful because the second ceremony is a real ceremony, provided nobody pretends it was the first.

If your wedding is abroad, this is a question to put to us, or to an advocate, before the tickets are booked, not after. Five minutes on the telephone while the plan is still flexible can save a year of correspondence. And if your case needs a lawyer rather than a service, we say that too.

If one of you is not an Indian citizen

Then there is a further layer, and we are going to be careful here because it is somebody's life and not a brochure. The marriage itself can be perfectly valid. What changes is the evidentiary standard everything downstream will be held to: the certificate will be read by a visa officer, perhaps legalised for use abroad under the Hague Apostille Convention 1961, and matched against travel records. Everything on this page about photographing the rites, naming the saptapadi and settling the date applies with double force. We do not do visa or immigration work of any kind, we do not advise on it, and a service that offers to “handle the visa side” along with the marriage is telling you something about itself.

One narrow point, because it catches government families in this neighbourhood: under Rule 21(3) of the CCS (Conduct) Rules 1964, a government servant who marries a person other than of Indian nationality must forthwith intimate the Government. That is an intimation requirement, not a permission requirement, and it is the servant's own duty.

5. The Arya Samaj ceremony, if you want the simple version

Not every family in Rajouri Garden wants the three-day version. Some couples — second marriages, inter-community marriages where one side is cool about it, couples who are paying for the wedding themselves, couples who simply find the whole circus exhausting — want a short, dignified, legally sound ceremony and nothing else. That is what an Arya Samaj wedding is, and it has been that for a hundred and forty years.

The Arya Samaj form was deliberately stripped of what Swami Dayanand regarded as later accretion. There is no dowry in it, no idol, no caste requirement, and no expensive priestly apparatus. What remains is Vedic: the fire, the vows spoken by both parties, and the saptapadi — the seven steps that make the marriage complete and binding under section 7.

What actually happens, in order

• Documents checked first. Age and identity for both, before anything begins. Any mandir that starts the ceremony before reading the documents is one you should walk out of.
• Madhuparka and the welcome. Short, and in a plain room rather than a stage set.
• Vivah sanskar at the havan. The fire is lit, the mantras are recited, and — this is the part that distinguishes the Arya Samaj form — the officiant explains in Hindi what each vow means before you make it. Consent is spoken aloud by both parties, not signalled on their behalf.
• Panigrahan and the pledges. The groom takes the bride's hand; the pledges are mutual, not one-sided.
• Saptapadi. Seven steps. At the seventh step you are married, and everything after it is celebration.
• Sindoor and mangalsutra, where the families want them.
• Signatures and the register entry. Couple, two witnesses, officiant. The entry goes into the mandir's register and the certificate carries that entry number.

Two to three hours, start to finish. Fifteen to twenty people is comfortable; six is fine; two witnesses is the legal minimum and they must be real people who were actually present, with their own original identity documents.

And the honest line, which we will repeat on this page as often as it is true: if your three-day wedding is already happening, with a pandit and a fire and the saptapadi, you do not need this ceremony and you do not need us for it. You need the five things in section 3 and a registration appointment. We would rather tell you that than take a fee for a ceremony you were going to have anyway.

6. What it costs, line by line — and what it does not

In a neighbourhood where wedding budgets are measured in lakhs, the legal part of a wedding is almost embarrassingly cheap. That gap is exactly where overcharging lives: a family spending eighteen lakh on a function does not blink at forty thousand rupees for “papers”, and some people in this business have noticed.

So here are the actual numbers, with the government fee kept on its own line, where it belongs.

Three honest situations, and what each one should cost you

• Your big wedding is happening and the file is clean. Both of you have matriculation certificates or passports, one of you has a residence proof, nobody has a living spouse. You need nothing from us. Do the five things on the day, prepare the affidavits, book the appointment, pay the government fee. Our charge: nothing.
• Big wedding happening, but the paperwork is awkward. Rented flat, name spelled three different ways across three documents, an old marriage to be mentioned, a bride whose documents are all in her father's address in another state. That is the ₹6,100 line, and it is worth it because the cost of a rejected appointment is two more half-days off work.
• No family wedding, or no wedding at all yet. This is where the ₹3,100 ceremony earns its fee honestly: a short, valid, documented marriage with a register entry number, in an afternoon.

We will send you those three lines in writing with no obligation, and we will tell you on the same message if we think you do not need the service at all. That costs us money on some calls. It is still the right way to run this.

7. Who the Act reaches — and the Punjabi-family question

Rajouri Garden is a mixed neighbourhood with a particular mix: Punjabi Hindu families, Sikh families, a good number of households where one side is one and one side is the other, and plenty where nobody has thought about it in two generations because it never mattered. Then a wedding is planned and somebody asks a question nobody can answer.

So, carefully.

Section 2 of the Hindu Marriage Act 1955 applies the Act to any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms or developments, and expressly to any person who is a Buddhist, Jaina or Sikh by religion, and to any other person domiciled in India who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew unless governed by another law. That express inclusion is in the statute itself. A Sikh–Hindu marriage, a Sikh–Sikh marriage and a Hindu–Hindu marriage are all capable of being Hindu marriages under this Act.

For Sikh families there is a second, dedicated route, and because Rajouri Garden has a large Sikh population it deserves a sentence here even though the detail sits on our court marriage page for this neighbourhood. The Anand Marriage Act 1909, as amended in 2012 by the insertion of section 6, provides for the registration of Anand Karaj marriages; the register entry is admissible as evidence, the validity of a marriage is not affected by non-registration, and a marriage registered under that Act need not be registered under any other marriage law. Delhi notified its Anand Marriages Rules on 9 February 2018, so the route exists here in practice and not only on paper. If your wedding is an Anand Karaj at a gurdwara, read that page rather than this one — it is the better fit.

Caste, and the 1937 Act

No Indian marriage statute contains a caste condition. No registration form asks for a caste certificate. The Arya Marriage Validation Act 1937 — nearly ninety years old — validates marriages between persons professing the Arya Samaj faith notwithstanding that they belonged to different castes or to different religions before. This is not a modern concession anyone grants you; it is settled law older than the Republic. Anybody quoting you a higher price for an inter-caste file is charging you for somebody else's prejudice, and you should say so and leave.

8. Eligibility — the five conditions, checked before the card is printed

Section 5 of the Hindu Marriage Act sets out the conditions for a Hindu marriage. They are short, and in a neighbourhood where invitation cards are printed four months in advance they are worth reading four months in advance.

• Neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage. Separation is not divorce. A decree of divorce is a document, and if there is one it should be in the file.
• Section 5(ii) — capacity to consent. Neither party is incapable of giving valid consent by reason of unsoundness of mind; nor, though capable of giving valid consent, suffering from a mental disorder of such a kind or extent as to be unfit for marriage and the procreation of children; nor subject to recurrent attacks of insanity. The statutory language is old; the point underneath it is current and simple — the consent must be real.
• Section 5(iii) — age. The bride must have completed eighteen years and the groom twenty-one years at the time of the marriage. Proved from a matriculation certificate, a birth certificate or a passport — never from an Aadhaar card alone, and never from a family's recollection.
• Section 5(iv) — prohibited degrees. The parties are not within the degrees of prohibited relationship defined in section 3(g), unless a custom or usage governing each of them permits such a marriage.
• Section 5(v) — sapinda. The parties are not sapindas of each other, unless a custom or usage governing each permits it. Section 3(f) defines the sapinda relationship as extending to the third generation inclusive in the line of ascent through the mother and the fifth through the father, counting from the person concerned as the first generation.

And the consequences, so that nobody is vague about them: a marriage in breach of the living-spouse, prohibited degrees or sapinda conditions is void under section 11. A marriage where consent was obtained by force or fraud is voidable under section 12(1)(c), but section 12(2) puts a one-year limit on bringing that petition from the date the force ceased or the fraud was discovered. In a neighbourhood where some weddings are arranged at speed and under family pressure, that one-year clock is the single most useful thing on this page for a few of the people reading it.

9. Checking a mandir before anybody pays — eight questions

Rajouri Garden sits in the middle of Delhi's wedding supply chain. Where there is a supply chain there are brokers, and some of the people who will quote you for an “Arya Samaj marriage” have no mandir, no register and no officiant — they have a phone number and a commission.

Eight questions, asked on the telephone before you pay a rupee. A real institution answers all eight without hesitating.

1. What is the full registered name of the mandir or sabha, and its complete postal address? Not “near Rajouri Garden metro”. A door number you can reach on a map.
2. Do you maintain a bound marriage register, and will the certificate carry its entry number? The entry number is the whole point. A certificate without one is a printed page.
3. Who will officiate, by name? And will he sign the certificate himself.
4. Will you check our documents before the ceremony begins? The right answer is yes, every time, and a mandir that starts the fire before reading an age proof is one to leave.
5. Will you give me the fee as three separate lines — ceremony, service, government — on WhatsApp, before payment? Any hesitation here is the answer.
6. Can we see the ceremony room? Ask to visit. Twenty minutes in person tells you more than twenty reviews.
7. Will you supply the witnesses? The correct answer is no. Witnesses must be people who were actually present and who can be found again. Anybody offering to arrange them is offering to weaken your own file.
8. Is registration guaranteed, and in how many days? Nobody can guarantee a government outcome. A confident guarantee is a confident untruth.

10. The certificate — the nine things it must carry

An Arya Samaj certificate is not a government marriage certificate and we have never pretended otherwise. It is evidence of the ceremony, produced by the institution that performed it, and its value is measured entirely by how well it stands up at a counter years later. Here is what a good one carries.

1. The full registered name and address of the mandir or sabha, printed, not stamped by hand.
2. A register entry number, and the page or volume if the register runs to volumes. This is the item that can be traced by telephone in thirty years.
3. The date of marriage — the pheras date, and nothing else. See section 2 of this page, because this is the field families most often get wrong.
4. The place of solemnisation, stated specifically.
5. Both parties' full names, parents' names, ages and addresses, spelled exactly as they appear on the documents you will produce at registration. Exactly. “Gurpreet” and “Gurpreet Singh” are two different names at a counter.
6. An express statement of the rites performed, naming the saptapadi. After the July 2024 judgment this is the single most important sentence on the page.
7. The officiant's name and signature — the person who actually conducted it.
8. Two witnesses' names, addresses and signatures, being people who were present.
9. Photographs of the couple, attested, and ideally a photograph taken at the ceremony itself.

11. Registration — West district, Rajouri Garden subdivision, 60 days

After the wedding, the certificate and the photographs, there is one thing left and it has a clock on it.

Under the Delhi (Compulsory Registration of Marriage) Order 2014, registration is compulsory and the window is sixty days from the date of marriage. After that there is an extended period with an additional ₹500, and beyond that a ₹1,000 penalty which the Additional District Magistrate may waive for reasonable cause. Registration under the Hindu Marriage Act is done by the Registrar of Marriages, who is the SDM — never by a court. The district courts at Tis Hazari and Dwarka register nothing.

Why section 8(5) means nobody should panic

Section 8 of the Hindu Marriage Act empowers State Governments to make rules for the registration of Hindu marriages, and section 8(5) provides that the validity of a Hindu marriage is in no way to be affected by the omission to make an entry in the register. So a marriage that was never registered is a valid marriage. What the unregistered couple lacks is proof in a form that banks, employers, passport offices and schools accept — and that lack can take a year to cure instead of a morning.

If the wedding is already past and the sixty days have gone, read our Janakpuri page, which is written entirely about registering an old marriage. There is no cut-off date.

12. Documents and witnesses — what to actually carry

For each of you

• Age proof — matriculation certificate, birth certificate or passport. Aadhaar alone is not age proof and offices increasingly say so.
• Identity proof — Aadhaar, passport, voter ID or driving licence.
• Residence proof for at least one of you. Only one. See the list below for a rented flat.
• Passport-size photographs, several more than you think you need.
• A joint photograph, and for a Hindu marriage a photograph of the ceremony itself.
• The Arya Samaj certificate, or the pandit's certificate and signed statement for a wedding held elsewhere.
• Separate affidavits from husband and wife, each stating the date, place and manner of the marriage, marital status at the time and that the conditions of section 5 were met.
• Where relevant: a divorce decree, or a death certificate of a previous spouse.

Residence proof in a rented West Delhi flat

This neighbourhood has a large rented population — couples who grew up in Tilak Nagar or Punjabi Bagh and have taken a flat near the metro. Offices accept more than people assume, and only one of you needs it:

• A registered rent agreement in either party's name, with the landlord's documents.
• An electricity, water or gas bill at the address.
• A bank passbook or statement showing the address.
• A voter ID or passport carrying the address.
• An Aadhaar updated to the current address.

If neither of you has anything, the parents' address works where one of you lives there, and the place of solemnisation founds jurisdiction in its own right. Our page on registering without address proof sets out the options in full.

Witnesses

Two, and the same two rules apply everywhere on this site. They must be people who were actually present at the ceremony, and they must attend the registration in person with their own original identity and address proof. The useful selection criterion is not seniority but findability: pick the cousin of your own age over the great-uncle, because in fifteen years one of them answers the phone.

13. Situations we see from Rajouri Garden and West Delhi

Every one of these is a real pattern, described without identifying anybody. If one of them is yours, the answer in it is the answer we would give you on the telephone.

“The pheras finished at 1.40 a.m. Which date?”

The date on which the seventh step was taken — so the following calendar day, not the day printed on the card. Settle it on the spot with the pandit, make sure it goes on his certificate and on both affidavits identically, and count your sixty days from it. Families get this wrong constantly and then spend two appointments explaining a one-day discrepancy between the card and the certificate.

“The photographer covered everything except the pheras”

It happens more often than you would believe, because a photographer optimises for the images a family will print, and the fire-side shots are hot, crowded and unflattering. If the album has no saptapadi frame: the pandit's signed statement naming the rites, the two witnesses who were present, the invitation card and the guests' own phone videos all still carry weight. Ask the family WhatsApp groups for videos within the first week, before anybody clears their phone. Then brief photographers in writing next time — yours or anyone else's in the family.

“Thirty lakh wedding, and the registration was rejected”

Almost always a name mismatch. The card said Simran, the school certificate says Simranjeet Kaur, the Aadhaar says Simranjit, and the mandir certificate copied the card. Nothing about this is fatal, but it is tedious: pick one spelling — the one on the document you will produce as age proof — and use it on the mandir certificate, both affidavits, the form and everything after. Decide this before the certificate is printed, not after.

“Both families are Sikh and the wedding is an Anand Karaj”

Then the Anand Marriage Act 1909 route is probably a better fit than this page, and our court marriage and registration page for Rajouri Garden sets it out in full, including what the Supreme Court said about it in September 2025. Do not let anybody tell you an Anand Karaj needs a second ceremony somewhere else to be valid.

“Destination wedding in Udaipur, we live in Vikaspuri”

Register in Delhi on the basis of residence, with Udaipur named as the place of solemnisation in both affidavits. Get the pandit's signed statement at the venue before you fly back. That one signature is the difference between a simple file and a difficult one.

“His parents have agreed, hers have not”

Neither set of parents is a legal party to your marriage. There is no consent column for them on any form, and no mandir and no SDM may ask for their approval. If there is a threat of interference, Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, (2018) 7 SCC 192, decided 27 March 2018, directed a specific machinery: a safe house at each District Headquarters, a Special Cell, a twenty-four hour helpline, immediate registration of an FIR where a diktat is issued against a lawful marriage, engagement by an officer of DSP rank with video recording, the use of sections 144 and 151 CrPC where needed, police assistance for the marriage and its registration, and fast-track trials to be concluded within six months. We are not a protection service and we do not do police work — but you should know the directions exist, and an advocate can act on them within a day.

“A tilak amount has been fixed between the families”

Where cash, jewellery, a car or property is demanded or given as a condition of the marriage, that is dowry. Giving, taking and demanding are all offences under the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961, and the labels — tilak, shagun, neg, milni, “custom” — change nothing. We do not handle, list, document, witness, hold or advise on any part of it, for either side, and nothing about your marriage or its registration requires any of it. The Arya Samaj form has never had dowry in it.

“He is in central government service”

Then Rule 21 of the CCS (Conduct) Rules 1964 is worth reading before the wedding rather than after: 21(1) bars marrying a person who already has a living spouse; 21(2) bars marrying while having a living spouse, with a proviso for Government permission; and 21(3) requires a servant who marries a person other than of Indian nationality to forthwith intimate the Government. Our Model Town page is written entirely for government-service families, including Form 4, Details of Family, under the CCS (Pension) Rules.

“Second marriage, divorce decree from 2019”

Entirely ordinary and no reason for any surcharge. Carry the decree; if an appeal period or an appeal was ever in question, carry proof that it is finished. Mention the earlier marriage honestly in the affidavit. A service that quotes you more because it is a second marriage is charging you for its own discomfort.

14. What we do not do — the list, in plain words

Most of what goes wrong in this business is not a mistake. It is a service agreeing to something it should have refused. So here is our list, in public, where you can hold us to it.

• We do not backdate a certificate. Not by a day, not by a decade, not for a pension file, not for a visa, not for a school admission. Ever.
• We do not certify a ceremony we did not perform. If your wedding was at a banquet hall in Rajouri Garden with your own pandit, the person who signs for it is that pandit.
• We do not supply witnesses.
• We do not manufacture address proof, or arrange a rent agreement for an address nobody lives at.
• We do not arrange conversions, and we do not treat anybody's religion as a step in a process. Where a conversion is genuinely contemplated, it has its own law in some States — Uttar Pradesh requires a sixty-day declaration under section 8 of its 2021 Act, and Haryana has a 2022 Act — and that is a question for an advocate, not for us.
• We do not proceed without real age proof for both parties.
• We do not touch dowry in any form or under any name.
• We do not guarantee a government outcome, a date or a timeline, because nobody can.
• We do not do protection petitions, police work, visas, immigration, property, succession or service rules. Where your question is one of those, we will say so and tell you to see an advocate.
• We publish no reviews, ratings or testimonials, and you will not find a star rating anywhere on this site. We would rather you asked us the eight questions in section 9.

15. The one-page checklist for a big Rajouri Garden wedding

Four months before — when the card is being designed

• Check age from a real document for both: bride 18+, groom 21+.
• Check the other four conditions of section 5: no living spouse, real consent, not within the prohibited degrees, not sapindas.
• Pick one spelling of each name — the one on the age proof — and tell the family that this is the spelling for every document.
• Decide who has a usable residence proof. Only one of you needs it.
• If the wedding is abroad, ask the registration question now, not after the booking.

One week before

• Brief the photographer in writing: the couple at the fire, and the seven steps, specifically. Not just the stage.
• Name the two witnesses who will be present at the pheras — the most locatable people, not the most senior — and tell them they will be needed again at the registration with their own originals.
• Print the affidavit drafts so only the date has to be filled in.

On the day

• Note the time the saptapadi finishes and settle the date — if it is after midnight, it is the next day.
• Take the pandit's full name, father's name, address, phone number and a signed statement naming the rites performed including the saptapadi.
• Confirm the photographer got the fire and the seven steps, before he leaves.
• Keep the invitation card.

Within the first week

• Email everything to yourself: photographs, the pandit's statement, witness details, the card. Albums arrive in three months; hard drives die in two.
• Collect guest phone videos from the family groups before anybody clears their phone.
• Check the certificate letter by letter, including the date and the word saptapadi.

Within sixty days

• Confirm by telephone that your address falls under the Rajouri Garden subdivision, West district — the boundaries changed on 1 January 2026.
• Attend with both witnesses in person, carrying their own originals.
• Pay the government fee yourself and keep the receipt in your name.
• Take three or four certified copies at once. You will need them for the bank, the passport office, the employer and the insurer, and a second trip costs another half-day.