Lost Document in Nepal: Which Office Actually Issues the Replacement

Losing a citizenship certificate or a lalpurja is not like losing a wallet. There is no single counter in Nepal where all of it gets sorted. Each document belongs to a different office, that office holds the original record, and the replacement comes from them and nobody else. Knowing which door to knock on saves a week of wrong turns.

What follows is a routing guide, not a checklist. It covers the documents people lose most often and names the office that actually issues the replacement. Fees and turnaround times get dealt with once, at the end, and only in general terms.

One step is the same for every lost document below. File a report at your local police office and keep the copy. Do that before you start hunting for photocopies, because you will be asked for it later.

The police report comes first

A lost document report is a short, ordinary piece of paper. You are not filing a case, you are recording that something went missing on a certain date. Keep the copy dry and keep a photo of it on your phone, since the next three or four counters will all want to see it. If you are unsure which police office covers your address, any local office can point you to the right one.

Lost citizenship certificate replacement: the District Administration Office

The record sits with the District Administration Office, the same office that issued your certificate in the first place. That is where the application goes. Bring the police report, and expect the office to check its own register for your entry before anything moves. If your certificate was issued in a different district from the one you live in now, ask both offices which one holds your file, because that answer decides where you file.

If you already hold a National ID card, take it with you. How the two records get cross-checked is still settling down, and the District Administration Office is the only place that can tell you what it wants in your case.

Lost national ID card (Rastriya Parichaya Patra)

The national ID is handled by the Department of National ID and Civil Registration, which enrols people through district and local-level offices rather than through the District Administration Office. Your photograph, fingerprints and details are already in that system, so a replacement is a reissue against an existing record, not a fresh enrolment.

Go back to the office that enrolled you, or the office now handling national ID work in your district, with the police report and whatever identity paper you still have. Ask before you travel whether the card is printed locally or sent from the department. That one answer decides how your week looks.

Lost passport: the Department of Passports and its branch offices

Passports are issued by the Department of Passports, and applications are accepted at branch offices in a number of districts as well as through the department itself. Which office serves you depends on where you live, so check the department's own site for the branch office covering your district before you set out. A lost passport has to be cancelled in the record before a new one can be considered, and that cancellation is done at the passport office, not at the police station.

The department publishes the current application form and the current list of what to bring on its own site. Read that page on the morning you plan to go, not from a screenshot a friend sent you last year.

Lost lalpurja: land revenue office first, survey office second

The land revenue office (malpot) for the district where the land sits holds the ownership record. The survey office holds the map and the measurements. A replacement touches both, and the order matters, so start at the land revenue office and let them tell you which step comes first in your case.

The standard step in reissuing a lost lalpurja is a public notice at the land revenue office, giving anyone with a claim on that land a chance to object before a copy is issued. It is part of the process, not a formality you can skip. How long the notice runs is set locally, so confirm the duration with the office when you file; a phone call settles it in two minutes.

Lost driving licence

Licences come from the Department of Transport Management, and the application is submitted through the transport management office that serves your district. The record itself, biometrics included, sits in the department's database, which is why a lost licence is a reprint rather than a fresh test.

Apply through the department's online system if your district office uses it, then follow up at the counter with the police report and a citizenship certificate or national ID. The department's site carries the current duplicate-licence form and the current fee, so take both from there rather than from any older guide.

School leaving and board certificates

SEE certificates are issued by the National Examinations Board, and the older School Leaving Certificate (SLC) series sits in the same archive, which NEB inherited from the Office of the Controller of Examinations. So a lost SLC certificate is also an NEB matter, not a district office matter, and the duplicate comes from NEB's office at Sanothimi, Bhaktapur.

The difference between the two series is in the search, not the issuer. An SEE record is quick to locate. An older SLC record can need a manual pull from the archive, so call NEB before travelling and take whatever your school still holds, whether that is an admit card, a registration number or an old result sheet. Those papers are what make a decades-old record findable.

Proficiency certificates, diplomas and degrees are different. The university or board that awarded the certificate is the issuer, not NEB and not the district office. Each institution runs its own replacement process, so go to the examinations office of that institution.

What this page does not do

It does not list fees, processing times or counter-by-counter document checklists. Those change with office decisions, sometimes inside a year, and a stale number here would cost you a wasted trip. Every office named above publishes its own contact details and its own notices, and one phone call before you leave is worth more than any guide, including this one.

It also does not explain how to obtain a document when the underlying record does not exist. That is not a paperwork problem, and no office will treat it as one.

[Editor's note, remove before publishing: internal link suggestions. Link "citizenship certificate" to the site's citizenship certificate guide, "lalpurja" to the land records and land revenue office guide, and "police report" to the district offices and contacts page.]