Chennai: Following the launch of an online portal for downloading birth and death certificates, the Directorate of Public Heath and Preventive Medicine is piloting digital signature feature to issue the documents at just a click.
“There are 16,528 registration units in Tamilnadu and the signatures of the authorities are scanned and it is being piloted. Minor glitches have been reported. If the test runs well, the feature will be rolled out from June and people can avail of a completely digitised document,” said DPH Director, K Kolandaiswami.
In March, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami had launched the website with QR code that help people of Tamilnadu download the birth and death certificates free of cost.
DPH officials state that the web portal has been operating since January 2018 to maintain records.
Commissioner of Municipal Administration and Town Panchayats in Tamilnadu have been maintaining the soft copy records for a few years, for which operations are under way to shift them to the website.
However, since the municipalities and town panchayats have used different languages to store the records, one year’s data has been given to the DPH technical team at Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) to migrate them to the Oracle domain. More than three crore births and deaths must have been maintained by them and we are expecting to bring them live on the portal within a year, said officials from the State Bureau of Health Intelligence (SBHI).
The hard copies of the certificates that are not with the local bodies but with the sub-registrar office, would be computerised. “The proposal is being processed and we are hoping to get a direction in two months to begin the process,” informed the officer.
Aadhaar number is being added to the document after seeking permission from the citizens. Eligible couples aged between 15 and 49 have been mandated to provide Reproductive and Child Health Identity (RCH ID) and during pregnancy, they should register with Pregnancy and Infant Cohort Monitoring and Evaluation (PICME) following which the infant would receive the birth certificate.
“Only five per cent of women do not have RCH ID and they would be referred to PICME and made to follow suit. Almost 99.5 per cent of births happen in institutions that rules out the possibility of omitting births. However, it is not the case with deaths. Around 25 per cent occur in hospitals and the rest in homes. We are developing a form to report the deaths which will be available at the e-Seva centres to maintain records. The pilot project is on,” added Kolandaiswami. So far, 12.46 lakh birth and 7.58 lakh death certificates are available online at crstn.org