Newborn paperwork kit — Maharashtra

Required for everyone

Depends on your setup

Journey-level pitfalls

• Costly mistake —The 21-day clock starts at birth, not when you get home. Report inside it and registration is free and routine; miss it and you are on a ladder that only steepens — a late fee up to 30 days, then written permission plus a notarised affidavit up to a year, then a first-class magistrate's order after a year (Section 13). This is the one deadline in the whole kit, and it falls in the three weeks when new parents are least able to think about paperwork. Give the job to someone who is sleeping.
• Costly mistake —If the baby was born in a hospital, the hospital is legally the informant — not you. The medical officer in-charge reports the birth, and the official FAQ is explicit that households are NOT to report such events. Your job is different and more important: check what they filed before you leave. Date, time, sex, place, both parents' names and every spelling.
• Costly mistake —One name, one spelling, everywhere. The birth certificate's name flows into the Aadhaar and then the passport, and each downstream application is checked against the one before it. A mismatch — an expanded initial, an extra vowel, a surname order — is the most common way a minor's passport stalls. Fixing it at the hospital desk takes two minutes; fixing it after the fact means a correction (Section 15) and a re-run of everything downstream.
• Costly mistake —A birth can be registered before the baby is named, and many hospital filings go in exactly that way. The name can be added free within 12 months of registration, and on payment of a fee up to 15 years (Section 14). But a certificate with a blank name is refused by Aadhaar, passport and school admission. If yours has no name on it, fix that before you try anything else in this list.
• Only the first certificate copy is free (Section 12). Ask for several certified copies while you are already at the counter — Aadhaar, the passport application and school admission will each want one, and each later trip costs a morning.
• The birth is registered where it happened, not where you live. Families often travel to a hometown hospital for the delivery; that local body's Registrar is the one you deal with, which is a great deal harder once you have gone home with a newborn. Plan for it before you travel back.
• Aadhaar enrolment is not finished when you leave the centre. The child's biometrics must be updated at 5 and again at 15 — free in the window, chargeable outside it, and an Aadhaar that has missed its update can stop authenticating at exactly the wrong moment, like a school admission or an exam form. Diarise it at enrolment.
• One parent's refusal does not block a child's passport. Annexure C exists for the case where one parent has not given consent — separated, estranged or untraceable. Expect closer scrutiny; do not accept anyone's claim that it is impossible.
• If a Registrar refuses or simply sits on your application, you have an appeal to the District Registrar, and against the District Registrar to the Chief Registrar — within 30 days, to be decided within 90 (Section 25A). Almost nobody knows this exists, so almost everybody gives up instead.