The government made registration of birth online mandatory to avail various citizen services, including enrolment in educational institutions, registration for secondary school certificate exams, applying for passport and driving licence.
Thousands of people are facing sufferings due to the slow and complicated delivery process of the vital document.
However, the government has made parents’ birth certificates mandatory for registering the birth of those were born after 2001, which increase the suffering.
Earlier, national ID card numbers of parents were sufficient to register a birth, but after the new rules, many parents found themselves in trouble while getting their children admitted to school. Now they must register their births first before getting their children’s birth certificate.
Many parents are returning from the union council offices and other offices concerned without registering their children’s birth certificate as they themselves don’t have the certificates.
Against this backdrop, a legal notice has been sent to the authorities to take steps for stopping harassment to get birth registration certificate. In the notice, it has been asked to take action within five days to investigate the allegation as to why the birth registration information of crores of people is not in the server.
Supreme Court lawyer Advocate Tanvir Ahmed Sarkar sent the legal notice on Monday. The notice was sent to four offices, including the LGRD secretary, birth and death registration department of the Local Government Division and the registrar general.
The legal notice included some media reports published recently.
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One of the reports states, “The birth registration law was enacted in 2004 and came into force in 2006. Birth registration certificate is mandatory for various important activities including passport issue, marriage registration, admission in educational institutions, obtaining driving licence and land registration.
At the beginning, handwritten certificates were given. At the end of 2010, an initiative was taken to digitalise it. At that time, the government also gave separate allocation for providing computer training to the responsible registrars. But not all the information was digitised at that time.”
The report also says, the server that used to work after 2010 was changed a year ago. An official of a city corporation said that all the information of the previous server was not transferred to this new server either. For this reason, many people are facing sufferings.
On the other hand, a BBC Bangla report says, “Officials of the Registrar General’s Office in charge of Birth and Death Registration in Bangladesh and Dhaka City Corporation said that millions of people who have registered their births before have to register their births online as their previous registration has disappeared. The birth registration of these individuals has not been updated online and it will no longer be possible to transfer old data to the new server. Authorities are also struggling to cope with the large number of online birth registrations by a large number of school children.
It is to be noted that work is underway to create digital unique ID for about four crore school students in Bangladesh, for which birth certificate has been made compulsory.
