Help with UK passport?

HELP! My passport is water damaged and I need to apply for my UK Student Visa (Tier 4). What should I do?

• Hi all.I have applied and got through for my Masters in UK and my session starts on September 19th. But today to add to my misfortunes, I discovered that my passport is water damaged. Now I'll have to apply for a reissue of passport and then my VISA. How much time do you all think will this take. Assuming the worst of worst, say I get my new passport in August, will I have enough time to apply for my UK VISA or will I not be able to attend school at all? I am so damn depressed over this. Please help.

• Answer:

  This happened to me. You WILL need to apply for a new passport. There is no way around it. Prepare a new passport application and go to the nearest passport office asap. However, the application is pretty complicated, so make sure you have everything that is necessary before you leave for submission. Getting the application complete and right involves a lot of careful reading of the application brochure and can be mentally draining, but if you get sent back once, it adds at least a couple of days to redo things. If the passport office is in your own city, that helps. Needless to say, pay the extra fee and apply through Tatkal. Get your application in the system. You should get an official application number. All Indian passport 'blanks' are made in Nasik. So your local office might only contain a limited number of them, and a long line of passports waiting to be made. I had to approach a person higher-up (I think the chief passport officer), citing extreme urgency and need for expedited processing, and showing them proof that my visa interview date was already fixed.  The expedited processing isn't official protocol, so you might need people skills with this. I wouldn't recommend attempting bribery, since the people you are dealing with are central govt. officers and not traffic cops. You'll need to convince the officer whichever way you can that yours is a genuine, rare, need-based request. The rest is up to the officer. It is a judgement call for them. PM me if you need further information/advice.