With eseva unable to issue and process the birth and death certificates on time due to myriad reasons, the GHMC is planning to once again deliver digitally signed certificates online. Yet, the move is fraught with many imponderables.
While ensuring that applicants get certificates faster sounds exciting, there are doubts if it will stand judicial scrutiny. “Unless the Registration of Births & Deaths Act is amended by the Central Government to allow digitally signatures there could be issues even if a single case goes to court since the act provides manual signatures only,” say senior officials.
It is also precisely the reason why a similar attempt made few years ago by the municipal corporation to introduce digital signatures did not get through. If digital signatures are allowed, applicants can source birth or death certificates online, at the citizen service centres in circle offices and esevas too.
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Birth and deaths data from 2007 till date has been computerised in all the circle ward offices. These certificates therefore can be obtained straightaway unless there are issues of spelling corrections, name changes and the like. Non-availability certificate and No Data certificates, however, cannot be issued online as these have to be physically verified.
Clean verification
For digital signatures, the Assistant Medical Officer of Health (AMOHs) are to be issued digital signature certificates and a private agency has been contracted to revalidate the available computerised data and to follow it with the data entry of information pertaining to 1957 to 2005. The work is to be further crosschecked by the AMOHs and health officials for clean verification of records.
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Sounds fine but “unless the online data is strengthened by a statutory backing there would be a problem, especially when manual records are unavailable,” argue senior officials. Such fears are not misplaced considering that birth or even death records are stored in open cupboards in most of the circle offices.
“They are in the open and can be tampered with easily,” reveal senior officials. Startlingly, proposals to buy metal cupboards for storing these records have been nixed by officials concerned despite being cleared by the Commissioner himself!