India Fresh Passport Application (Ordinary, Adult, Citizen by Birth)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-03

Why this candidate, why now

The GOV-869 "GovSchema Standard Research" cycle's first phase was to catalog the existing registry against the six focus verticals (DMV, Business Formation, Visa, Passport, Taxes, National ID & Civic Documents) across the ten jurisdictions already in scope (US, GB, IE, CA, NZ, AU, DE, SG, FR, NL). That matrix was found saturated at 59/60: every cell has at least one authored schema except nl×Visa (investigated and ruled out in GOV-859 — the Schengen short-stay form would duplicate fr/france-visas/schengen-visa- application, and the national long-stay MVV visa is fragmented across 200+ purpose-specific forms with no single representative one) and eu×ETIAS (not live until Q4 2026, per GOV-822/GOV-756). With no further gap to close inside the existing ten jurisdictions, this cycle opened an eleventh jurisdiction instead — the same routine-expansion move GOV-829 made for the Netherlands as the tenth. India was chosen for population scale, growing agent-economy relevance, and — decisive for sourcing — the Ministry of External Affairs publishes its passport application's column-by-column field guidance, applicant-category table, and document list directly in English on its own domain, rather than requiring a login-gated portal or a non-English-only source.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): in/mea/passport-application-first-adult / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Government of India, under the Passports Act, 1967. Applications are processed through the Passport Seva system (Regional Passport Offices, Passport Seva Kendras, Post Office PSKs, District Passport Cells, Speed Post Centres, and Citizen Service Centres).
• Primary source (fetched directly, HTTP 200): https://www.passportindia.gov.in/AppOnlineProject/pdf/ApplicationformInstructionBooklet-V3.0.pdf — the MEA's own 21-page "Instructions for Filling of Passport Application Form and Supplementary Form" booklet. Covers: the full column-by-column guidance for both forms (Sections B and C), the applicant-category table mapping each fresh/re-issue case to its required documents (Table 2), the overall document list (Table 3), the fee list (Table 4), and specimen annexures (A, C, D, F, G, H, I, J).
  • Extraction technique. This PDF renders its text via embedded CID-keyed fonts. The usual zero-dependency technique (decompress Flate-encoded content streams, regex-match Tj/TJ string operands) only recovers whitespace/kerning-array placeholders here, not the underlying glyphs — a different failure mode than GOV-634's glyph-obfuscated PDF (which rasterize-and-read solved) because poppler/pdftoppm is not installed in this environment. Instead, a scratch npm install pdfjs-dist@3 (legacy Node build, driven via a small script with getTextContent() per page, not a browser) correctly resolved the CID font's glyph-to-Unicode mapping and extracted clean, readable text for all 21 pages. This is the technique to reach for first, ahead of rasterization, whenever a PDF has genuine embedded-font text (not scanned images) that the naive regex approach garbles.
• Secondary corroborating source (raw curl fetch, not an AI-summarized WebFetch, to avoid summarization risk): https://www.bankbazaar.com/passport/how-fill-passport-application-form.html — an independent third-party field-by-field summary of the live application form. Used only to confirm the exact enum strings for three fields (gender, maritalStatus, employmentType) that the official booklet describes narratively ("put a cross in the appropriate box") without listing the box-label text itself. Raw HTML fetched directly confirms verbatim: "Gender: Male, Female, Transgender"; "Marital Status: Single, Married, Divorced, Widow/Widower, Separated"; and the employment-type list encoded in fields[].employmentType.validation.enum.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-03.
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (Standards Engineer — initial authoring source review).

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) / document(s) | |---|---| | Column 1.1/1.2 — "Fresh Passport ... if you have never held a passport" | previouslyHeldIndianPassport | | Table 2, Case I(B) "Minor" | applicantIsMinor | | Column 2.8 — "Citizenship of India by" (birth/descent/registration/naturalization) | citizenshipBasis | | Column 2.1 — Given Name & Surname | surname, givenName | | Column 2.2 — aliases | hasAlias, aliasGivenName | | Column 2.3 — name changes | hasNameEverChanged, previousGivenName | | Column 2.4 — Date of Birth | dateOfBirth | | Column 2.5 — Place of Birth (India vs. abroad vs. Undivided India) | placeOfBirthCountry, placeOfBirthCity, placeOfBirthDistrict, placeOfBirthState | | Column 2.6/2.7 — Gender, Marital Status | gender, maritalStatus (enum corroborated via bankbazaar.com) | | Column 2.9/2.10 — PAN, Voter ID | panNumber, voterIdNumber | | Column 2.11/2.12 — Employment Type, employer organization | employmentType (enum corroborated via bankbazaar.com), employerOrganizationName | | Column 2.13 — parent(minor)/spouse government servant | isSpouseGovernmentServant | | Column 2.14 — Educational Qualification | educationalQualification | | Column 2.15 — Non-ECR eligibility | eligibleForNonECR, documents[].proofOfNonECRCategory | | Column 2.16 — distinguishing mark | distinguishingMark | | Column 2.17 — Aadhaar Number | aadhaarNumber | | Column 3 — Family Details, spouse name from spouse's passport | fatherGivenName, motherGivenName, legalGuardianName, spouseName | | Column 4 — Present Residential Address Details | presentAddressLine1/City/State/PinCode, permanentAddressSameAsPresent | | Supplementary Form Column 3 — Permanent Residential Address (if different from present) | permanentAddressLine1 | | Column 5 — Emergency Contact Details | emergencyContactName/Phone/Address | | Column 7 — Other Details (pending criminal case, court permission) | hasPendingCriminalCase, documents[].courtPermissionLetter | | Column 1.4 — Type of Application (Normal/Tatkaal) | processingSpeed | | Column 1.5 — Type of Passport Booklet (36/60 pages) | passportBookletType | | Table 3, Document No. 1 — Proof of Present Address | documents[].proofOfPresentAddress | | Table 3, Document No. 2 — Proof of Date of Birth | documents[].proofOfDateOfBirth | | Annexure 'A'; Table 3, Document No. 45 — Identity Certificate | documents[].identityCertificate, gated on employmentType in government/PSU/statutory-body | | Section E, Table 4; Column 8 — fee payment methods by submission channel | documents[].applicationFeePayment |

What is NOT independently confirmed / out of scope

• A live Passport Seva Online Portal walkthrough. This document is transcribed from the MEA's own instruction booklet, not a completed live online-application session (the portal requires a registered account and an OTP-verified mobile number to reach the actual entry form). The booklet's columns are stated by the MEA to be shared between the online portal and the paper form, but the online screens' exact field-by-field presentation (single page vs. wizard steps, client-side validation messages) is not directly observed.
• educationalQualification's exact closed option list. The booklet only says "put a cross in the appropriate box"; no source examined during this cycle states the box labels verbatim, so this field is modelled as free text rather than a guessed enum, per this registry's "spec precision over cleverness" discipline — an unverified enum is a worse defect than an honest free-text field. Confirming the live options is flagged as a future MINOR addition.
• gender/maritalStatus/employmentType enum wording. Confirmed only via a secondary, third-party source (bankbazaar.com), not the MEA's own wording directly — the booklet describes these columns narratively without quoting the checkbox labels. Flagged here and in the schema's own verification.notes so a future reviewer knows to prioritize confirming these three against a live portal session before advancing to verified.
• Minor applicants (Case I(B)), re-issue, citizenship by descent/ registration/naturalization (Case I(A)(2)/(3)), diplomatic/official passport holders, and Tatkaal-only document variants are out of scope of this "first adult, citizen by birth" document, matching this registry's narrow-first-schema-per-jurisdiction convention (fr/ants, gb/hmpo, ca/ircc, au/apo all scoped their first passport schema the same way).
• Fee amounts. Table 4's fee figures are not encoded as a single authoritative amount on documents[].applicationFeePayment, since fees change over time — the same convention de/bmi/passport-application and nl/rvig/passport-application used.

Scope and jurisdiction notes

• This is India's first registry entry, opening it as this registry's eleventh jurisdiction alongside US, GB, IE, CA, NZ, AU, DE, SG, FR, and NL. discovery/catalog.json's scope.jurisdictions and description were updated accordingly.
• Conditional flow uses requiredWhen (GSP-0013) for the alias/name-change/ address/spouse-name/employer-organization branches, requiredWhen with the in operator for the government/PSU/statutory-body-gated Identity Certificate document, and steps[].transitions with exitReason (GSP-0013 §4) for the three genuine eligibility gates (previously held a passport; minor applicant; citizenship not by birth) that exit this flow to an unmodelled process.
• dateOfBirth, aadhaarNumber, and panNumber are marked classification: sensitive-pii; the remaining name/address/contact fields are marked classification: pii, per GSP-0006's advisory vocabulary.
• Mock-data condition-evaluator testing (a full positive-control profile — married, government-employed, Non-ECR-eligible, no pending case; three negative controls exercising each of the three eligibility exits; and an edge-case profile — single, privately employed, pending criminal case, permanent address different from present address) confirmed every requiredWhen/transitions branch resolves as intended: the positive control has zero missing required fields and correctly requires employerOrganizationName, spouseName, and the Non-ECR/Identity- Certificate documents; the three negative controls each exit at eligibility with the correct exitReason; and the edge case correctly drops the now-inapplicable spouseName/employerOrganizationName requirements while requiring permanentAddressLine1 and the court permission letter. No script is checked into the registry (structural-reference schemas in this registry do not carry conformance fixtures — GSP-0016 fixtures are used once a schema reaches verified).

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer with a genuine Passport Seva Online Portal account completes an actual online application walkthrough (or obtains independent confirmation from someone who has), confirming: the educationalQualification and any other unconfirmed option lists directly against the live portal's own field labels, whether the online and paper forms are truly field-identical, and the current fee figures.

Re-verification

Per the practice's cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months).