New Delhi Municipal Council set to digitise old birth, death records

Residents in the areas under New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) will no longer have to struggle to get birth and death certificates of their family members with the civic body starting digitisation of decades-old birth and death records. After digitisation, the records will be sent to the zonal offices of all the civic bodies.

NDMC leadership believes that digitisation would also put check on civic employees seeking bribes to provide old records.

Before trifurcation of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in 2012, all the records related to birth and death used to kept at the Civic Lines office, which now falls under the jurisdiction of the NDMC. All the records dating prior to the 2012 trifurcation are still at the NDMC’s Civil Lines office.

Leader of House in the NDMC Vijay Prakash Pandey said that the decision to digitise the birth and death records has been inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India initiative and it will immensely help the city residents.

“Today whole process of finding old records is a difficult and tiring one. People have to travel to the corporation office several times. After digitisation, the whole process will be made smooth and simple,” added Mr Pandey.

A well-placed source in the NDMC said that to find out old records from mountains of files with birth and death certificates, employees used to seek bribes. “They (employees) gave 100 reasons to not enter the recordroom to find out his/her records. For all this, the civic body employees used to ask for some monetary favour, leading to a practice of corruption and harassment of the common man. Digitisation will end such a practice,” he added.

After completion of digitisation processes, the NDMC will send the records to respective zonal offices of the civic bodies so that people can get the documents from there easily. “No one has travel from one corner of city all the way to Civil Lines office to get a copy of birth or death certificates. Old records will be sent to all the zonal offices from where people can get them,” said Mr Pandey.