UP implements suo motu birth registration, certificates to be issued promptly

Newborns at government health facilities of Uttar Pradesh will now be issued birth registration certificates immediately after delivery without the parents having to apply for the same.

For this, the Uttar Pradesh government has integrated its Maa Navjaat Tracking app (MaNTrA) with the birth registration system as part of its efforts to provide 'ease of living' to the citizens using digital technology.

The Directorate of Census Operations, Lucknow, has partnered with the Uttar Pradesh National Health Mission (NHM-UP), UNICEF and the Office of the Registrar General of India, Delhi, to facilitate generation of automatic birth registration certificates at government facilities, said Partha Sarthi Sensharma, the principal secretary in the Medical Health and Family Welfare Department of the state government.

In doing so, Uttar Pradesh has become the first state to implement suo motu birth registration for government health institutions (verifiable through the CRS portal), he told PTI.

Explaining the procedure, Sensharma said the Civil Registration System (Office of Registrar General, India) application programming interface pulls data for 17 fields from the Maa Navjaat Tracking app (MaNTrA) managed by NHM-UP.

The data is then configured into a birth certificate to be digitally signed by the hospital registrar, Sensharma said.

"Birth certificates thus can be handed over to the parents of the newborn within hours of birth. The application programming interface (API) is now operational for all government health institutions which function as Registrars (up to the primary healthcare level) albeit with minor difficulties on the part of Registrars. Around 2,500 birth certificates have already been issued so far," Sensharma told PTI.

The process has been started in around 1,000 public health facilities, he said, adding, "It would be our endeavour in coming months to roll it out to each of the government facilities so that in each case an automatic birth registration certificate is issued then and there."

The MaNTrA app was developed in Uttar Pradesh with the support of UNICEF to monitor the quality of services in the Labour room and has been successfully rolled out across the state in public health facilities.

"The idea was to seamlessly integrate the MaNTrA app with the birth registration system to facilitate automatic birth registration certificates at the facility itself, even without an application. It is a step towards increasing the ‘ease of living’ of a common citizen by creatively using digital technology architecture. It is a constant endeavour of the state government to use the latest technology to make life easier. We are doing our efforts in that direction and we have many miles to go," Sensharma said.

Last month, the Maa Navjaat Tracking Application (MaNTrA) for Delivery Point Health Facilities, National Health Mission, Government of Uttar Pradesh was awarded the Silver Award under the Category-1 'Government Process Re-engineering for Digital Transformation' of the National Awards for e-Governance Scheme 2023.