Gazette notification for a name change

What the Gazette is, and why an entry in it settles the question

The Gazette of India is the official public journal of the Government of India. It is where the government publishes what it needs the public to be able to find and rely on — legislation, rules, notifications, appointments, and a range of other matters. It is published by the Department of Publication, which sits under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and the electronic edition is hosted on the e-Gazette portal by the National Informatics Centre.

What makes a gazette notification useful for a name change has nothing to do with permission. Nobody at the Department of Publication approves your change of name, and there is no Act under which they could. What the publication does is put the fact on an official, dated, publicly retrievable record.

That is precisely what an institution asking for "proof of name change" wants. A bank is not adjudicating anything; it is looking for something it can put on its file that will still stand up in ten years. An affidavit is a private document sworn before a notary. A newspaper announcement is a paid insertion. A gazette notification is an entry in a government publication of record that anybody can retrieve from a government website. Of the three, only the last is verifiable by the institution itself, independently, at any point in the future.

Which is why the whole chain converges here, and why an exercise stopped at the affidavit stage tends to have to be repeated.

Central gazette or State gazette: which one you need

Both exist. The Government of India publishes the Gazette of India, and States publish their own official gazettes. Both are publications of record, and the practical question is which one the institutions you are dealing with will accept.

A central gazette notification is published in the Gazette of India, Part IV, by the Department of Publication, and is widely recognised — though “widely” is the accurate word rather than “universally”: no rule obliges a State authority to accept it in preference to its own procedure.

A State gazette notification is published by the State’s own government press and is accepted by that State’s departments, its universities in many cases, and by institutions within the State.

What is worth being precise about — because a great deal of what is written on this subject is not — is that a State gazette is not automatically refused by central authorities. UIDAI, which is the central authority most people are actually dealing with, says on its own site that for a change of first name or full name you should provide a "notification copy of Gazette (anyone from State or Union Govt.)". It accepts either. So the question is not which gazette is superior; it is what the particular authority you are dealing with asks for.

That is the right way to make the decision. Work out which downstream record actually needs the gazette — it is usually Aadhaar, PAN, a passport, an employer’s service record or a university — and ask that body, in writing, what it accepts. Where the answer is "either", the choice comes down to cost and speed, and the State route is sometimes the quicker one. Where you cannot get an answer and the change has to serve several bodies you have not yet dealt with, the Gazette of India is the more conservative choice, because it is the one no institution has a policy against.

Which guideline applies to you — there is not just one

The single most useful thing on this page, and the thing no other page in this category has: the Department of Publication does not publish one procedure for a change of name. It publishes a separate guideline for each scenario, and the documents differ between them. Assembling the papers for the wrong one is a common reason an application comes back.

Find your situation in the table below and read the Department’s own guideline for it before you assemble anything. These are the Department’s documents, linked directly rather than by way of its homepage.

What the Department publishes as the fee, and how it is paid

The adult guideline states a printing charge of ₹1,100 for publication of a change of name, ₹3,500 for Indians living abroad, and ₹1,100 plus ₹250 — ₹1,350 — where an applicant adopts a name associated with another religion without changing religion.

Two caveats have to go with those numbers, and both come from the guideline itself rather than from anywhere else. First, the guideline states the ₹1,100 figure against a date range of 1 April 2016 to 31 March 2017 and has not been re-dated since; the ₹1,350 figure is marked "till date". It is published here as the Department publishes it, because inventing a tidier version would be worse. Second, payment is made through the Non-Tax Receipt Portal, Bharatkosh, and has been since 1 October 2018 under the Department’s own order.

Confirm the current amount with the Department before paying. Last verified: 3 September 2026.

What the application contains

This is the part of the subject where almost every other page is wrong, and the error is always in the same direction: a generic list assembled from what sounds plausible — an affidavit, a deed, two newspapers — rather than the list the Department publishes. The list below is the Adult (Major) guideline’s own, in its own order.

Two things in it are worth pausing on. The first is that the Department asks for an undertaking, not a notarised affidavit: a statement signed by you showing your old and new name with your father’s or husband’s name and full residential address, declaring that the facts are true and correct to the best of your knowledge and belief. An affidavit is still worth having for the downstream offices — a bank or a State department will often want one — but it is not what the Department’s general guideline calls for.

The second is the deed changing name. It is not a general requirement either. The adult guideline names it in two situations only: for a person working with the Central Government, who may submit a deed in accordance with Ministry of Home Affairs O.M. 190016/1/87-Estt. dated 12 March 1987, with a specimen deed attached to the guideline; and for an Indian living abroad, who submits a deed attested in original by the Indian embassy or High Commission. What every applicant submits instead is the printing proforma, which is a short specimen the guideline reproduces, typed in duplicate and signed in the old name with two witnesses.

1. 1An undertaking duly signed by the applicant, showing the old and new name with full details of the father’s or husband’s name and the residential address, and declaring that the facts stated are true and correct.
2. 2The original newspaper carrying the advertisement — the entire page, not a clipping and not a photocopy. The guideline asks for one recent advertisement in a daily local leading newspaper.
3. 3The prescribed proforma in duplicate, computer typed, signed by the applicant in the old name with two witnesses giving their full names, addresses and mobile numbers.
4. 4A CD containing the print matter in MS Word, without the witness portion, with the old name typed in place of the signature.
5. 5Two self-attested passport-size photographs and a self-attested photocopy of a photo identity document.
6. 6A certificate signed by the applicant declaring that the contents of the hard copy and the soft copy are the same, and undertaking responsibility for any mismatch or loss in transit.
7. 7A request letter together with the requisite fee, paid through the Non-Tax Receipt Portal.
8. 8A deed changing name — only where the applicant works with the Central Government, in the form of the Ministry of Home Affairs O.M. of 12 March 1987, or is living abroad, in which case the deed is attested by the Indian mission and submitted in original.

After publication: retrieving and using the notification

Once the notification is published, it appears in the Gazette of India and is retrievable from the e-Gazette portal. That electronic copy is what most institutions will accept, and it is worth downloading several copies and saving the retrieval details.

Search the portal by the date of publication and the part of the Gazette in which the notification appeared; the acknowledgement you receive from the Department will tell you both. Save the file, note the reference, and print a few copies. Institutions differ on whether they want the printed copy, the file, or the reference — having all three costs nothing.

Then the downstream phase begins, and the order matters. Aadhaar and PAN first, because most other institutions verify against one or both of them. Then the passport. Then banks, demat accounts and insurance. Then employer and provident fund. Then property records, the driving licence, the voter roll and the ration card.

One category should be pulled forward out of that order: education records. Several boards and universities impose a time limit on a name change measured from the award of the qualification, and it is the only downstream update on the list that can expire. Ask about that rule at the start rather than at the end.

How you prove the change afterwards, and to whom

The point of the whole chain is what happens when somebody, years later, notices that two of your documents carry different names. That happens more often than people expect, and it usually happens at an inconvenient moment: a background check, a property sale, an insurance claim, a pension application, an immigration process.

What settles it, in every one of those situations, is the same set of documents: the affidavit, the newspaper pages and the gazette notification, produced together. They establish that the person named on the older document and the person named on the newer one are the same person, on a dated and independently verifiable record.

Two practical points follow. First, a document in your old name is not invalid and does not need to be replaced for it to remain effective — a title deed, a degree certificate, a life policy or a court decree in your old name is perfectly good. What it needs is the evidentiary link beside it. Second, the set is worth keeping in more than one place, and worth telling your family about, because the people who most often need to produce it are not always you.

Worked examples