About Me — Mohsin Raza, Lucknow

How it started

It started with small jobs. Someone needed an income certificate for a scholarship; someone else needed a domicile certificate for an admission. I knew how to work the portal, so I'd sit with them and fill in the form. Slowly, people began arriving with files full of papers — and almost everyone's first question was the same: "Where do I even start?"

What I kept seeing

Most applications didn't get stuck because the person wasn't eligible. They got stuck on small things: a scan over 100KB, a self-declaration uploaded as a PDF instead of a JPEG, a name spelled one way on Aadhaar and another way on the form. People mixed up their SRN and their Certificate Number, paid more than the fixed fee at a counter because nobody told them the rate, or waited for weeks without knowing their file was sitting with the Lekhpal for verification.

None of this is secret. It's just scattered — and much of it exists only in English or official Hindi.

Why three languages

In Lucknow, people speak Hindi, read Urdu and work in English — in many families, all three at once. Urdu is one of the official languages of Uttar Pradesh, yet you will hardly find a guide to these services written in it. So everything here is written in Hindi, English and Urdu, and every language version is complete.

How I keep it accurate

Every step, fee and timeline in this guide comes from applications I've worked through myself, checked against the official portals. Rules change, so I update the pages when they do — the date at the bottom of every page shows when it was last reviewed.