The Hindu 30.11.2013
Chennai Corporation suspends issuing of birth, death certificates
A few days ago, the civic body had unearthed bogus documents
The Chennai Corporation has suspended issuance of fresh birth and death certificates.
This follows the unearthing of irregularities in issuing of certificates earlier this week.
The civic body is planning to evolve a new system to fix responsibility for uploading and validating the certificates.
Certificates of birth and death recorded in some major hospitals that already have provisions for uploading data directly have not been validated today, said a Corporation official.
The validation is done only after the hard copy of the registers from the hospitals is screened by public health department officials.
“There is a system in place to issue birth certificates on the same day. However, we suspended it on Friday,” said the official.
Residents can, however, download already validated birth certificates.
The work on uploading and validating new birth certificates will resume after a foolproof system is in place.
New system
The civic body is planning to deny permission to all sanitary inspectors to access the new system for uploading and validating births and deaths in the 426 sq. km. of the city.
“Only 46 sanitary officers are likely to be given the responsibility of uploading and validating the data. Access by other employees will not be permitted,” said an official of the Chennai Corporation.
The data in the fresh birth certificates should corroborate with registers maintained by the hospital after verification by the 46 sanitary officers.
The bogus entry in birth and death certificates issued by the Corporation was easy because of access given to sanitary inspectors. Two officials were suspended on Tuesday for making bogus entries.
The suspended officials had allegedly misused the password to make entries in birth certificates, uploaded it and validated the fake certificates.
Process to be simplified
The Corporation will however take steps to simplify the process of issuing birth and death certificates to residents by streamlining operations.
The number of births registered in each zone ranges between 20 and 80 per day.
Zones with major hospitals have large number of births and deaths recorded per day.
