In the next phase, the BMC plans to introduce SMS alerts to keep applicants updated on the progress of their birth/death certificate applications

Mumbai: The BMC on Thursday introduced a computerised application management system at Citizen Facilitation Centres (CFCs) across all ward offices enabling birth and death applicants to submit requests and track their progress at a single location.The move comes after TOI’s August 2 report, ‘Birth certificate bottlenecks leave weddings, visas in limbo; BMC seeks 7 more registrars’, on how citizens were facing inconvenience in obtaining their birth certificates from the civic body. BMC’s medical health officers and record section doctors have reached out to the aggrieved cases mentioned in the report and tried to iron out the issues they were facing in obtaining the birth certificates.The new system will cover services including correction of birth, death and marriage certificates, insertion of a child’s name in birth certificates, and conversion of old birth and death certificates into the new QR code-enabled format. Officials said applicants will receive a Unique Acknowledgement Number (UAN) allowing them to track the status of their requests at the CFC.In the next phase, the BMC plans to introduce SMS alerts to keep applicants updated on the progress of their applications.Until now, citizens had to submit applications directly to the office of the medical officer of health and visit the office repeatedly for updates. The BMC said the manual process also made it difficult for the administration to monitor pending applications and workloads effectively.Additional municipal commissioner Prajakta Verma Lavangare said the new system is aimed at making birth and death registration services more transparent, efficient and citizen-friendly while ensuring time-bound processing of applications.The BMC has also set up dedicated counters at CFCs for converting old birth and death certificates into the new QR code-enabled format, a service expected to benefit applicants seeking corrected certificates for education, passport, visa and other official purposes.For birth and death records registered before 2016, citizens can apply for the new-format certificates through the Centre’s Civil Registration System (CRS) portal. However, the BMC said processing of such applications may take longer as older records require additional verification. The civic administration said efforts are underway to streamline verification of legacy records and reduce processing time.Advocate Faiyaz Alam Shaikh, who has been dealing with complaints pertaining to delay in obtaining digital birth certificates, said, “Birth registration is the foundation of a person’s legal identity. A birth certificate is the primary statutory document through which an individual’s identity, age, parentage and nationality-related particulars are officially recorded. Unreasonable delays in registration or correction directly affect citizens’ ability to exercise several constitutional and legal rights, including access to education, passports, employment, marriage registration, inheritance, banking and social welfare schemes. Therefore, efficient and timely civil registration is intrinsically connected.”