OCI Card

Hello,

Recently i applied for my five month old US born daughter's OCI application which is still in process. Since the processing time is like around two to three months, thought of sharing the experience from preparation to submission of the application.

Application submitted at CKGS (San Francisco) with walk-in : July 3, 2019
Received the submitted US Passport: July 9, 2019
OCI status: in process

I did a lot of research online for every little thing whether its about the form filling or required documents or anything else. My goal was to submit the application in the first attempt. Because i have heard many applicants were sent back for minor corrections and one of my friend had to go four times to submit the application successfully. As far as i have heard, if there is a mistake in the application, they don’t take corrected application on the same day and you have go there next day or get a new appointment. I think if the case is about incomplete documents then they accept it on the same day but i am not completely sure about this. In my case i had to drive for an hour to get to the CKGS office so i really wanted get done with the application in the first try.

APPLICATION PREPARATION:

Prepwork:
The best starting point is to read “BEFORE SUBMISSION” and “POST SUBMISSION” sections throughly on https://www.in.ckgs.us/oci/how-to-apply and i would say don’t ignore even a single line. Make a note of the important points for e.g. left thumb impression for boys and right thumb impression for girls.

Whenever you are not sure about what to fill in the form, i recommend you to go through the CKGS FAQ section https://www.in.ckgs.us/faq/oci and if you don’t find anything then you might need to research online. If you are not sure whether you need to get a thumb impression at one place or both on some form, take multiple copies of it in a different way. For e.g. one copy of page with single thumb impression at one place and other copy of page with two thumb impression at two different places. Basically, different combinations of thumb impressions.

There is a sample government OCI form on the CKGS website https://www.in.ckgs.us/resources/pdf/sample-oci-application-form.pdf which you can refer to. This is very helpful because you can avoid some common mistakes such as entering something other than “USDOS” as the place of issue for the US passport.

For me, what helped the most is that there is a video on youtube which talks about the whole process. Just search for “OCI application process” and you will find it. The video is divided into two parts (part 1 and part 2).
Since the videos are little old, little things have changed in the form but they are not that critical.

Photo:
You can get it in the Costco either a hard copy and later scan it for online upload or just get both hard and digital copies.
In either way, you would need to resize the photo and reduce the size to match the requirements. I tried Costco but the photo was not that great because they put white towel on the car seat on which i had to place my baby and then take a photo. Since the towel was not plain i could see it clearly in the picture and the picture was little dark too. The total cost for this was $15. Also, if you are planning to get the photos done from such places like Costco, Walgreens, UPS, or anywhere else consider carrying a plain white sheet along with you because not all the places have arrangements for the baby’s photo and we were actually sent back due to this. If the applicant is old enough to sit on a chair then there might not be any issues since in such case they will use the sliding white background which they typically do for the adults. After visiting multiple places, i finally went to a photo studio where i got both hard copy and digital copy. Best part is that they gave me a resized and reduced version of digital photo which met the online upload requirement without any issues. The total cost for this was $25.

When you upload the photo on government website, it will notify you right there whether your photo meets the requirement or no.

Signature:
For the baby’s thumb impression, if you are planning to buy an inkpad then buy a removable ink one because we got the regular one and it took some time to remove the ink from baby’s thumb. Take multiple thumb impressions on a plain white paper. We took them when the baby was sleeping.

I followed these steps to resize the signature image and it worked without any issues:
1. Open the image in Microsoft paint application
2. Select the signature area such a way that it will properly show up in a rectangular box on the form
3. Crop the selection
4. Press the resize button
5. Here in the resize and skew window click on pixels
6. In the resize and skew window, deselect the maintain aspect ratio checkbox
7. Type 360 in the horizontal box and 120 in the vertical box. This will give you 1:3 aspect ration for height and width
8. Save the image as JPEG image and make sure that it's less than 200kb
9. The image is ready for the upload

When you upload the signature on government website, it will notify you right there whether your signature meets the requirement or no.

Notary:
First of all take multiple print outs of the pages where you need a baby’s thumb impression because that needs to be done in front of the notary person. If the thumb impression does not come as expected, you can also use the extra print outs.

Documents checklist:
Carefully read each and every line especially the things that are in bold. For e.g. copy of first three pages of parents passport. For some of the Indian passports, the first page has state emblem of India and some stamp with signature so take a copy of this page too. I would say just do as they say. Though they returned most of the extra pages during the application submission but it's always better to carry them because you never know.

Documents upload:
Since there is a 1000kb per file limit for the document upload on government website, don’t try to crop or resize the high quality scanned image instead scan the pages at low quality level. In my scanner i had set 100 DPI for the quality so it resulted into a single scanned file with 150kb size. Eventually, put all the scanned files in a single file to generate a single PDF file. When you prepare parents passport pages, make sure to put them in a single pdf file as there is just one document upload option for this.

APPLICATION SUBMISSION:

I had an appointment at around mid July but i did a walk-in on July 3rd as one of my friend suggested it. Reached at 7:30am to the CKGS San Francisco office because i heard sometimes there is a huge line. Fortunately, when i went there there was no one and i think its because next day was a July 4th which was a holiday (may be because people usually plan vacations around these dates). So, may be you can try to do the walk-in at around holidays so that it will be less crowded. The office opened at 9am and i was done in 15 minutes also because i was the first in the line. For your information, they charge $17 for walk-in visit and they take that only if your application is accepted. After they accept your application, they cancel your appointment.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:
- You don’t need to take your child or spouse in order to submit the application even if any of them is an applicant.
- I think the CKGS San Francisco accepts walk-in applications from 9am - 11am
- You can always re-upload documents on government website but only until certain stage of your application process. Mostly this stage is when the consulate accepts your application from CKGS but i would say double check on this because i am not very sure.
- Take extra prints and copies just as a backup
- Consider doing a walk-in at around holidays

Hope this helps.