Come June 1 and overseas job aspirants from Kerala will be saved the trouble of travelling to the attestation centre under the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi or the branch secretariats in Chennai, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Kolkata or Mumbai for getting their certificates attested to be eligible to apply for job visa.
The MEA is in the process of decentralising the job, as part of which the Regional Passport Officers (RPOs) in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram will be empowered to dole out the services, including normal attestation and Apostille.
(Apostille is endorsement of documentation done in 105-member countries of the Hague convention, which obviates the need for legalisation of foreign public documents.)
In a circular issued to the RPOs in April, the MEA has asked them to comment if or not they have the capacity in terms of availability of space and manpower to handle attestation and Apostille services.
The circular also seeks their suggestions on the feasibility of “outsourcing the collection and return of documents by outsourced agencies as is being done by the Attestation Cell at MEA”.
Prasanth Chandran, RPO, Kochi, said the move would benefit overseas jobseekers from Kerala but it would bring an anticipated load of processing 81,000 attestations from Kerala and Lakshadweep.
The circular makes it clear that while the Attestation Cell at Delhi will continue to dispense attestation requests for a month from June 1, the job will be left in its entirety to the RPOs after this period.
At present, the Attestation Cell and the Branch Secretariats endorse educational certificates from the State and the archipelago as an appellate entity after they are attested by the designated centres of NORKA-Roots.
A manager at a NORKA-Roots attestation centre told The Hindu that right now the attestation centres also recommended to the appellate centre birth, death and marriage certificates, affidavits, power of attorney, and educational documents issued overseas.
“Once the RPOs are designated to endorse these certificates, normal and Apostille documents will be handled at a single location, much to the relief of overseas jobseekers.”
Succour for
job aspirants
Regional Passport Officers in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi to be empowered
Ministry of External
Affairs in the process of
decentralising the service
Normal and Apostille documents will be handled at a single location
