Published : 28 Feb 2023, 06:37 PM
Updated : 28 Feb 2023, 06:37 PM
Bangladesh has eased the process of correcting some mistakes in the registration of births and deaths, allowing people to do so at the local offices of city corporations and union councils.
Previously, the registered birth names, addresses, names of mothers and fathers, and other information on these documents had to be corrected at the offices of the district administration or through the offices of the executive upazila officer in the case of unions. This had led to many complaints and long waits for many trying to make use of the services.
On Feb 22, the office of the registrar general sent a letter to every city corporation, deputy commissioner, and chief executive officer of cantonment boards across the country informing them of the change.
The rules for the registration of births and deaths say that a person can make corrections in the 90 days after the initial registration was done.
However, the BDRIS software used to correct minor errors, such as the person’s name, the names of their parents, their address and the number of children, required the upazila executive officer, the municipality, the city corporation, or the cantonment board to make the correction through the deputy director of local government, which took a lot of time and led to public suffering.
As such, corrections to names, addresses, and other minor errors can now be corrected at the relevant registration offices in order to ease the process of registering births and deaths, according to the letter.
It also instructed the relevant offices to take the necessary steps to launch these services.
It is believed that this will significantly reduce the problems faced by people trying to make corrections.
People sometimes had to go from their unions to the upazila or even the district level in order to fix mistakes, said Adud Mahmud, chairman of the Satgram Union Council in Narayanganj’s Araihazar Upazila. With this new initiative, they can just go to the union council offices.
“It was very difficult to correct a mistake,” he said. “To do so I would have to go from here to Araihazar. Sometimes, the process would not be completed in a day and I would have to stay. In these cases, it isn’t so much the money, but the time necessary to travel back and forth that is causing the difficulty. Those who work or run a business face difficulties. But now we can make any corrections at the union level.”
If anyone made an application for a correction, it was accepted and sent to the deputy commissioner’s offices and at least a week would pass before it was sent back, an official working at the Birth and Death Registration Wing of the Dhaka North City Corporation said.
