More than 2 years after my last post, I decided to write up my experience with taking a major life decision changing my citizenship from Indian to Singaporean. It can still be a fairly opaque affair where you don't know what the status of your application at any time is. Here's hoping that you find some information that may be useful to you.
My wife and I decided to apply for Singaporean citizenship in 2016 and scheduled an appointment at the ICA to submit our application on 09-Jan-2017. At that point, I had been in Singapore for 7.5 years (~3 years as a PR) and my wife had been here for a bit more than 3 years (~2 years as a PR).
We collected all the necessary documents and went to the ICA. We were asked whether we wanted to submit two separate applications, or if my wife wanted to submit it as a dependent of mine. We had originally wanted to submit our application as a family so we were not sure which was the closest approximation (Spoiler alert: It's the latter). We decided to submit separate applications as my wife was not really dependent on me having her own income, and the applications did include spouse details so they would get linked at some point.
For the next 11 months, complete radio silence as the application made its way through the system and iEnquiry constantly showed the status as a terse "Pending". Then in mid-December 2017, my wife got an email from an officer at the ICA saying that they had reviewed her application and were recommending that she apply as a dependent to my application. They asked both of us to bring some additional documents (marriage certificate, my payslips for the past 6 months, etc) and sign and acknowledge amendments to her application. While at the ICA, I noticed that her application had been examined in some detail with various annotations along the margins and we took that to be a good sign. After all, why go through such effort to end up rejecting the application? We also asked the officer how long it would take for a decision to reach us and he gave us a reply of 4-5 months (Spoiler alert 2: It didn't; I guess he was just trying to manage expectations by giving a worst-case timeline).
Finally in early February 2018, we got letters dated 01-Feb-2018 that our applications had been approved in principle and we were required to go through some assimilation programs as part of the Singapore Citizenship Journey before final approval. Interestingly, iEnquiry still showed the status as "Pending" at this point; I guess it is more binary than I thought.
We were going on holiday two days after we received the letter so we scheduled program appointments (where needed) for early March. Towards the end of Feburary, we completed the e-Journey, which is the online learning session covering Singapore's history, civil systems and cultural norms. We attended the Community Sharing Session at our local community centre on 09-Mar-2018, which was a great (and at times, emotional) experience getting to know other new citizens and hearing about their experiences living in Singapore and adopting it as their home country. Finally we went for the Singapore Experiential Tour the next day on 10-Mar-2018, where we covered part of the Jubilee Walk starting at the National Museum and ending at the National Gallery. All in all, very engaging experiences and I did learn a few things about Singapore's history that I did not know previously.
All our statuses for the programs were marked as completed in a few days by 14-Mar-2018 and iEnquiry showed my application as "Approved" and my wife's application as "Approved (In-Principle)" by 22-Mar-2018. The reason for the latter was likely that as a dependent her citizenship was contingent on me accepting the citizenship in the first place. I got the physical approval letter the next day (my wife's approval came attached with mine), instructing us to go to the High Commission of India (HCI) to renounce Indian citizenship, and scheduling our appointment for registration of citizenship at ICA for 11-Apr-2018.
We went to the HCI's authorized agent in Singapore, BLS International, to initiate the process of renunciation on 26-Mar-2018. After completing the form and submitting the documents, we were given a date of 04-Apr-2018 to collect the renunciation letter and cancelled passport from HCI itself. Hence, we decided to bring forward our appointment at ICA to 05-Apr-2018 and fortunately still had a couple of open time slots for that day.
On the day of registration, we took our renunciation letters, photographs and current ICs to ICA where the documents were verified and our current ICs were collected and punched through making them invalid. Then, we provided our fingerprints and photographs for our new ICs and were given an acknowledgment slip that is meant to be our temporary IC until we get the actual ones at a constituency-level citizenship ceremony in a few months' time. Finally, we were directed to the Commissioner of Oaths before whom we verbally pledged our renunciation of Indian citizenship and allegiance to Singapore, before signing the same pledge. She congratulated us and was the first to welcome us as Singaporeans. The entire process took about 30-40 minutes including getting our photographs done.
We could have gone to apply for the Singapore passport in the ICA the same day, but we would have had to get slightly different photographs done as well as pay a bit more to do it in-person. Hence, we decided to do it online via APPLES since we already had our digital photographs. The system however did not allow us to submit our online application on the same day as we register as citizens (someone somewhere must have used '>' instead of '>='), so we applied for our passports on 06-Apr-2018, and got the notification that they were approved on 11-Apr-2018.
We arranged an appointment for collection on 18-Apr-2018, went down to ICA and picked them up having to wait for about ten minutes. And that was how we changed our passports from blue to red!
Hope this is of some help to you, and do feel free to comment below if you have any questions or observations.
We arranged an appointment for collection on 18-Apr-2018, went down to ICA and picked them up having to wait for about ten minutes. And that was how we changed our passports from blue to red!
Hope this is of some help to you, and do feel free to comment below if you have any questions or observations.
