Mumbai: A Goa woman has postponed her wedding registration after waiting months for a correction to her Mumbai birth certificate. A Bandra family fears a nephew’s Dutch residency application could be jeopardised because they have been told a digitally printed birth certificate may take up to eight months. Students headed overseas are struggling to meet admission and visa deadlines.BMC has now formally admitted it’s facing a severe bottleneck in processing old birth and death records. In a July 22 letter to the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, municipal commissioner Ashwini Bhide sought approval to appoint seven additional district registrars to speed up approvals of nearly “one crore legacy records”. The existing system is overwhelmed, says her letter.The letter, accessed by TOI, says 200–400 “Add Old Events” applications reach the district registrar every day, while nearly 1,000 applications are pending approval. Under the new Civil Registration System (CRS), every approval requires an Aadhaar-linked one time password (OTP) sent only to the district registrar and valid for 60 seconds.“It is physically not possible for the district registrar to provide this number of OTPs within 60 seconds,” the letter states.Mumbai has nearly one crore legacy birth and death records in manual and electronic formats that must be digitised under Registrar General’s new guidelines. Demand has surged as citizens require birth certificates for passports, marriages, admissions, visas, inheritance claims and other legal purposes.To ease the bottleneck, BMC has requested Centre to designate seven deputy executive health officers as additional district registrars with separate logins to process approvals. It has also sought permission from Maharashtra govt to empower all 26 medical officers of health, along with deans and chief medical officers of civic hospitals, to function as registrars.For applicants, the delays have become deeply personal.A 27-year-old woman now living in Goa said she applied in March to correct her full name on her birth certificate after being told the process would take 10 days. “My fiancé came from abroad in June, but we couldn’t register our marriage. We’ve postponed it to September and still don’t know when the correction will happen,” she said.An Andheri resident alleged that corrections made by BMC in its SAP system in 2019 are still not reflected in the new CRS portal. “BMC is not willing to honour certificates issued by itself and isn’t giving any clarity. I’ve been following up since May,” the resident said, adding that the discrepancy could create complications in inheritance matters.In another case, a Bandra West resident said his nephew in the Netherlands urgently needs a digitally printed birth certificate for permanent residency but has been asked to wait six to eight months despite seeking no corrections.Former BJP MP Kirit Somaiya, who had earlier exposed alleged irregularities in birth registrations, said the issue does not affect new registrations.“There is no problem in obtaining birth certificates for newborns within 21 days. Corrections are also possible if adequate documentary proof is submitted. The issue arises mainly with decades-old handwritten records, which need to be digitised before corrections are made,” he said.He said the digitisation process was made mandatory after the birth certificate scam he exposed in which 86,000 fraudulent certificates were reportedly issued under the guise of corrections.A BMC health department official said, “We are afraid. Our colleagues have been suspended; FIRs are being filed. Why are we being targeted?”Congress MLA Amin Patel said genuine applicants are paying the price. “Students admitted to universities abroad are the worst affected. Delays are disrupting visa processing and travel plans,” he said.Former Congress corporator Asif Zakaria alleged the process has become excessively centralised. “Earlier, certificates issued after 2002 were available from citizen facilitation centres across Mumbai,” he said. Now, applications are routed through ward offices before being sent to Central Record Centre in Parel for verification, creating delays even for records that are already digitally available.The crisis comes amid an ongoing investigation into irregularities in birth registrations. A Mumbai Police SIT is probing suspected unauthorised changes to birth records after BMC found discrepancies between corrections made in its in-house SAP system and those recorded on the official CRS portal. It suspended two medical officers and lodged an FIR alleging irregularities in birth registrations.BMC is also developing software for birth certificate applications and correction requests that will allow uploads and provide a dashboard to track applications.
