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The recently enacted Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, has added another layer of complexity and difficulty to the official documentation required by citizens for various purposes. The legislation was introduced in the monsoon session, passed in a hurry, and has become law. It makes birth certificate necessary as a single document for admission to an education institute, for issuance of a driving licence, for listing as a voter, for Aadhaar number, marriage registration, or for a government job. The purpose, according to the government, is to create a national and state-level database of births and deaths. It has said that changes were needed in the previous law to keep pace with the technological and societal changes that have taken place in the last many decades and to ensure that there are linkages between real-time, national-level population database and other demographic databases like ration cards and voter rolls.
The first problem with the law is the circular nature of its mandate, with the birth certificate or the Aadhaar becoming mutually supporting or dependent. Registration of any kind with government offices in the country offers serious challenges. If the registration is made so important that it will have a decisive impact on a person’s life, it may result in denial of rights and justice to large numbers of people. One major issue is that the consequence of the failure of parents to register births will be borne by children. The children can later complain or question why they were made to pay the price of such failures which will be very common in our country.
The law will lead to exclusion of large numbers of people even from basic needs like education. The facilities for easy registration do not exist in many states and sometimes even bribes have to be paid for that. Births that take place even in government facilities are not registered in states like Bihar, while registration of births and deaths is near-total in socially and educationally advanced states. As in the case of programmes like family welfare, compulsion does not help in this matter also. The law is best implemented only when the social basis for its implementation is favourable for that. Implementation of the law is not the only problem. Making a single document the sole basis for citizen rights is wrong and risky. The law is to be implemented prospectively. But a birth certificate cannot be created retrospectively at a future date and so those who do not have it will live the life of non-citizens, excluded from documented society. There will be large numbers of them, and that is not good for society.