Dolly Vadalia’s struggle began 18 days after she was born in the Xai Xai province of Mozambique in 2000. Days after her birth, her parents had to return to India because of a devastating flood that hit the province and they failed to register her birth at the Indian consulate.On April 30, the Gujarat High Court turned down her plea for an Indian passport, stating that she had “failed to prove her Indian citizenship” by way of birth or descent under provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955.Mozambique authorities have also refused to grant her a passport because she did not return to the country before her Emergency Certificate, which enabled the family to leave during the flood, expired.The Rajkot-based 26-year-old Vadalia nee Baria, a trained dietician, wishes to join her husband in Canada but cannot without a passport, and remains “stateless” although she has been writing “Indian” wherever nationality was sought.According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international legal definition of a stateless person is “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law”.The matter of Dolly’s citizenship has come up now, 26 years later, after the Government of India twice rejected her application for an Indian passport, which she sought after her marriage to her Canada-based husband.Dolly, who has not had a valid passport since her birth, met her husband in India, where they got married.Story continues below this adWhile Dolly holds an Aadhar card, voter ID (she voted in the recent local body polls), PAN card (as an Indian taxpayer), and a master’s degree from an Indian university, the past two years have been spent running from office to office and writing letters to various ministries, the Mozambique High Commission in Delhi and the Indian High Commission in Maputo, the capital of the African country, trying to find a way out of this Catch-22-like situation that allows only a person with a “valid foreign passport” to apply for Indian citizenship.Dolly Vadalia told The Indian Express that she plans to appeal before a high court division bench. “Because the circumstances of our return from Mozambique were such that there was a massive flood in which we could have died. My parents waded through floodwaters and reached the airport before flying out of there to India. In that situation, nothing apart from the Emergency Certificate was possible to enable me to leave the country.”Escape from disaster and citizenship claim by descentDolly’s father Ketan Baria went to Xai Xai, Mozambique, with his wife Aarti in 1995, where he managed a wholesale grocery business with a cousin who had already been there for several years. Dolly was born on February 18, 2000.“The very next day, the flooding began. It was so sudden and destructive that our house and the shop were underwater. We took refuge with our neighbours on a higher floor of the building”, Baria said.Story continues below this adXai-Xai city of Gaza province lies about 210 km from Maputo. Ketan Baria said, “As the flooding continued, the Indian population in Xai-Xai were beginning to return home because of the fear of diseases in the aftermath of the flood. Because it was a small town, emergency services like medical aid were not always available, and we had a newborn child. So we got an Emergency Certificate from the government and were flown to Maputo city by helicopter and from there to India by flight. But her birth could not be registered there at that time due to the situation.”A World Bank report of April 7, 2000, read, “From February 4 to 7, 2000, due to the effects of cyclone Connie, Maputo city received 455 mm of rainfall, or nearly half the average annual total. Similar exceptionally heavy rain across southern Mozambique exacerbated normal seasonal flooding, inundating low-lying areas. From February 20 to 22, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, filling reservoirs on river basins draining through southern Mozambique and triggering more extensive flooding, particularly along the Limpopo, Incomati, and Umbeluzi rivers. It was the first time in recorded memory that all three river systems flooded at the same time in Mozambique.”As per the report, dam releases and heavy rain in the Limpopo catchment area caused the river “to send a wall of water through Chokwe and lower Xai Xai in the middle of the night”.Baria said, “We could have returned to Mozambique, but the situation had not improved at the time. So we decided not to return there.”Story continues below this adThough Dolly now has a birth certificate, it was not submitted to the Indian embassy or consulate within one year of her birth, which is necessary to claim Indian citizenship by descent, said Baria.As per the provisions of section 4(1) of the Citizenship Act, 1955, “Birth of every child born abroad should be registered with the Consulate, within one year from the date of birth of the child. Only after registration of birth as Indian citizen, the child becomes citizen of India and eligible for Passport or any other services rendered to Indian citizens.” This was also part of the Centre’s submission while arguing against Dolly’s petition.The Catch-22 situationThe main problem facing the family is that there are seven categories under which a person can apply to be an indian citizen under the Citizenship Act. However, the first requirement in the applications of all these categories is “copy of a valid foreign passport”.But since Dolly is not considered a citizen of Mozambique, or any other country—making her stateless—she does not have a valid foreign passport. “Without this requirement being fulfilled in the online registration system, the system doesn’t allow the user to proceed to the next step, effectively ending the process before it even begins,” said her 55-year-old father.Story continues below this adAfter the Gujarat High Court declined to accept her as an Indian citizen by descent and asked her to apply for citizenship, they approached the Rajkot collectorate on May 9, but were refused there again, saying the system did not permit Dolly to apply for citizenship in the absence of a “valid foreign passport”, according to her brother-in-law Ronak Vadalia.Rajkot Acting Collector Anandu Suresh Govind did not respond to questions on this case.26 years without a nationalityAsked why Dolly’s citizenship was not sorted out throughout her childhood, Baria said, “In those years, there was no passport office in Rajkot, the closest ones were in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. When I asked someone in the Ahmedabad office regarding my daughter’s status, I was told that she could choose citizenship at the age of 18 years and claim it by descent, and so we did not think it necessary to do anything at that point in time.”Since Dolly’s other identity documents were processed without any problems, the family saw no need to seek a passport till she married her Canada-based husband.Story continues below this ad“When we first approached the Regional Passport Office (RPO) to get the passport, they first asked us for a citizenship certificate. So we approached the Rajkot collectorate to apply for Dolly’s Indian citizenship. We had all the other documents except a valid foreign passport. But Dolly came to India on an Emergency Certificate whose validity was just three months. So we wrote to the Mozambique High Commission in Delhi to give us a letter. But they said that once the EC expired and Dolly had not gone back to Mozambique, they could not do anything about it,” said Ronak Vadalia.He said, “It was then that we filed the petition in the Gujarat HC appealing this entire situation where the document ‘valid foreign passport’ sought by the collectorate to apply for citizenship was not possible to get at all. That has been our main argument for the last two years now.”In 2025, the Vadalia family had approached a Rajkot court, seeking directions that Dolly’s birth be “deemed” to have taken place in India. In an order dated October 16, 2025, K R Gagnani, Judicial Magistrate First Class of the Municipal Court in Rajkot, directed the registrar of births and deaths at the Rajkot Municipal Corporation (RMC) to do so.“The RMC then issued the birth certificate with Rajkot Municipal Corporation as the place of birth,” said Ronak Vadalia.Story continues below this adHowever, this was challenged in court as the government said the place of birth was incorrect.