Ending the ordeal of a woman to get her year of birth corrected in official documents including Aadhaar, voter ID, PAN and passport, the Delhi High Court has ordered the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the last to resist her plea, to update the birth year in her class X certificate for a nominal fee.
Born in Chennai on February 27, 1981, Prema Evelyn Dcruz was homeschooled and did not formally enrol in any educational institution from 1993 to 1999. Availing the services of an agent, she later applied to appearing in the class X or secondary school examination of the CBSE under the ‘private candidate’ category.
However, while submitting Ms. Dcruz’s documents, the agent mistakenly registered February 27, 1983 as her date of birth, which came to be reflected on the admit card for class X examination and, subsequently, in other documents.
Years went by with the erroneous details, until July 2019, when Ms. Dcruz learnt that the Greater Chennai Corporation had digitised and published all birth certificates in the public domain.
Ms. Cruz got access to her birth certificate, on the basis of which she corrected the year of birth in her Aadhaar, voter ID, PAN and Passport.
However, when her requests to the CBSE for the same correction in her class X certificate bore no fruit, she took the legal route to the Delhi High Court.
Justice Chandra Dhari Singh, who passed the order to the CBSE, compared Ms. Cruz’s position with that of the protagonist of ‘Kaagaz’ — a 2021 satirical comedy film about a common man, played by actor Pankaj Tripathi, struggling to prove his existence after being falsely being declared dead on government records.
“Though the movie was placed in the decades of 1970s, how much the situation has improved 50 years hence, remains to be introspected [upon],” Justice Singh wondered.
Ms. Cruz, in her plea, said that her birth certificate has been relied upon by the Income Tax Department to issue her PAN, the Election Commission to issue her voter ID, the Unique Identification Authority of India to issue her Aadhaar, and the Ministry of External Affairs to issue her passport with the correct date of birth in the statutory documents.
She said that the CBSE was bound to rectify its records in accordance with a public document, and it had even not disputed the authenticity of her birth certificate.
However, the CBSE had vehemently opposed the plea, saying that the change sought by Ms. Cruz is not a mere correction in the documents, but a way to change her age in official documents.
It added that Ms. Cruz has moved her application after more than a decade, and that it has to maintain its records as per the Weeding Out Rules, 1998, according to which records are weeded out after the limitation period, which stands at 10 years for candidates who have appeared for examination under the private category.
Justice Singh, however, noted that the future prospects of Ms. Cruz will be affected if the entry of date of birth in the class X certificate does not tally with that in the birth certificate issued by the statutory authority. The judge added that if Ms. Cruz was not allowed to rectify the record in CBSE documents, it may put her in “serious hardship”.
