50KB is the tightest limit you will meet on an Indian exam portal, and it is usually asked for a single scanned page: a caste certificate, a domicile proof, a marksheet. At that size the trade-off is real, so compress a one-page scan rather than a whole document, and scan in greyscale if the original is black ink on white paper. Colour scans of plain text waste most of the budget on paper tint.
When to use this
Asked for by: SSC CGL and CHSL document upload, UPSC applications, state PSC portals, police and railway recruitment forms, and scholarship portals that cap each supporting document separately.
Frequently Asked Questions
My PDF will not go under 50KB. What now?
Almost always it is a colour scan. Re-scan or re-export in greyscale and the same page typically drops by half before any compression runs. If it is still over, the page is probably a photograph rather than a document scan, and 50KB is not realistic without losing legibility.
Will the text still be readable at 50KB?
For a single greyscale page of printed text, yes. For a multi-page document or anything containing photographs, no. Split the file and compress only the page the portal actually asks for.
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