Making birth registration hassle-free

Every child has the right to a legal identity. But many children born these days do not officially exist. According to the Office of the Registrar General, Birth and Death Registration, more than half of children under five years of age in Bangladesh do not have their births registered. As a result, these children are deprived of the proof of their identities and the reason  is  their parents face problem accessing registration service. Without a birth certificate, children are invisible to the government. This means they may miss out on essential programmes like child protection, health care and education that help secure their most fundamental rights.

Since the government made online birth registration mandatory for all citizens from January 2021, people had to undergo untold sufferings   to avail 18 citizen services including enrolment in educational institutions, registration for secondary school certificate examination, applying for a passport and driving license. They face numerous difficulties while filling out the forms online as well as face harassment at the relevant government offices where they have to go in person to submit the forms or correct the errors. Many also blame the inefficiency of government employees for mistakes in birth certificates prepared manually as all the information provided by applicants are not properly uploaded online while a number of people find their data missing from the main server.  Birth and death registration   under the two city corporations of Dhaka often remains closed due to technical problems at their malfunctioned server. The process was closed during the entire month of August. Despite fixing the server, it continues to remain nonfunctional for most of the time. This puts many registration seekers in a rough patch.  Parents who want to enrol their children in new classes in January are often the victims,   because no educational institutions would accept    children their without a birth registration certificate.

Registration within 45 days of birth and death requires no fee. Between 45 days and 5 years, the fee is Tk 25. Applicants who follow due process and do not  seek any assistance from the brokers do not get their certificates on time. According to a parent who wanted to get the certificate on his own, tried for a month to access the website, but was unsuccessful. So, to avoid hassles, people are paying the brokers Tk 1,000 to Tk 1,500 to get the certificates. Some parents fail to get the certificate even after paying the brokers.

In many countries, children are registered at birth, eliminating the need for parents to apply separately. Hospital authorities provide them a worksheet to fill in and later that sheet is used to register a birth digitally. Even in neighbouring India, newborns receive birth registration certificates immediately after birth. The Philippines has recently launched an online portal to register every birth. Bangladesh has also gone virtual to register every birth and death but this has been done without properly developing the system. By using better and more efficient technology, the problems of issuing birth and death certificates and correcting their errors could be resolved. Digitisation of any system should guarantee its users better service. And the birth registration process, too, should be easier, faster and hassle-free.

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