Every year, large numbers of aspiring parents from all over the world come to India to fulfil their dreams of parenthood. They hire an Indian surrogate and with the help of state-of-the-art medical technology, they are able to conceive children they can call their ‘own’. Since 2005, commercial gestational surrogacy in India has become a lucrative industry thanks to the cheap gestational labour, and cheaper medical services. However, this largely unregulated industry is facing roadblocks in international bureaucratic processes. The child born from the arrangement is often caught between conflicting international laws and deemed ‘stateless’. I wish to look at how the state and international laws tend to define persons and relationships by regulating entry and exit, especially through verification and authentication of kin. The world of transparent and visible boundaries – and their policing – is seen through the transnational processes of identifying the stateless children born through the arrangement. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.