Name Change Agent in Dharamshala

Dharamshala is the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, which moved here in 1960, and McLeodganj above the town is home to a large Tibetan community. So we get enquiries here that we do not get anywhere else in Himachal, and the honest answer to a lot of them is that we are the wrong people to ask. The documents most Tibetan residents hold are not Indian civil records. A Registration Certificate, usually called an RC, is issued by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office or the Foreign Registration Office as a stay permit and is renewed periodically. An Identity Certificate, or IC, is a travel document issued through the Regional Passport Office and normally requires a recommendation from the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Green Book is issued by the Tibetan administration in exile, not by the Government of India.

A notice in the Gazette of India is not the instrument that changes a name on any of those. Nor is it something we can arrange on your behalf and then quietly hope works. The area also touches citizenship questions, including for people born in India between 1950 and 1987, which courts have ruled on and which are genuinely complicated. We are a documentation service, not lawyers, and this is exactly the kind of matter where an agent guessing costs somebody far more than the fee. If your papers are RC or IC, the offices to approach are the FRRO or FRO that issued the RC, the passport authority for the IC, and the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for the recommendation side. We would rather tell you that in the first message than take money for the wrong thing.

On 19 January 2017 the Chief Minister formally declared Dharamshala the second capital of Himachal Pradesh, making it the third administrative division in India to have two capitals, after Maharashtra and the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. This was not a sudden announcement. A full winter session of the Vidhan Sabha had been held outside Shimla for the first time in December 2005, and the Vidhan Sabha Bhawan at Tapovan had been functioning for years before the declaration. The stated purpose was that people from Kangra, Chamba, Hamirpur and Una would no longer have to travel to Shimla for their work.

For a name change file the practical effect is smaller than people expect, and it is worth saying so rather than dressing it up. The Gazette that matters for an individual name change is the Gazette of India, published by the Department of Publication in Delhi, and that does not change because Himachal now has a second capital. What does change is convenience. State level offices and the winter session sit here, so correspondence you might once have chased in Shimla can often be dealt with in the Kangra valley. That helps with state records. It does not replace a central notification.

Dharamshala is a town in Kangra district and has been the district's administrative headquarters since 1855, when the seat was moved here from Kangra town about eighteen kilometres away. So the district printed on your birth entry, school certificate or land record is Kangra, not Dharamshala, and always has been. That is the single most common confusion we see from this town, usually when somebody outside the state assumes the district must share the name of the place they have heard of.

Behind that sits the wider Kangra history. This district was in the Punjab province until the hill areas were transferred to Himachal Pradesh on 1 November 1966, and the district was trifurcated in 1972 when Hamirpur and Una were carved out of it. So a family here can hold a pre 1966 paper naming Punjab, a paper naming Kangra district throughout, and modern papers naming Himachal Pradesh, with the town constant all the way through. Our Kangra guide sets that sequence out in full, including how far the old district once stretched.

NameChangeAgent is a platform built for exactly this one job, done properly. We are based in Delhi and we work with families in and around Dharamshala entirely online, from Kotwali Bazaar, Dari and Sidhpur to Sidhbari, Gaggal, Yol, Naddi and McLeodganj. You send photographs of what you have on WhatsApp. We read them, tell you honestly which route your case needs, and then carry it through.

What makes Dharamshala different is not that the process changes. It is that two questions come up here which do not come up elsewhere, and both are answered by being straight rather than by selling. The first is the district, because your papers say Kangra and people outside the state assume that is wrong. The second is harder. This is the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, and a large number of residents hold Registration Certificates and Identity Certificates rather than Indian civil records. A Gazette notice does not change a name on those, and no honest agent should imply otherwise. We tell you which side of that line you are on before you pay anything, because a file worded correctly the first time does not come back, and a file we should never have taken helps nobody.