The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government has planned to link electoral rolls with death and birth data to automatically update the system. The move comes amid various flaws existing in current system, a fact that even the government has accepted.
Despite the registration of births and deaths being compulsory under the Registration of Births & Deaths Act, 1969, its implementation has continued to be far from satisfactory in several states and union territories.
There are states which have doubtful data. An example is when a person in Nangloi who went to vote in the MCD elections last year was told he was ‘dead’ on record. There are also several cases where deceased persons have also made it to the electoral lists during various elections.
As per the government, despite compulsory registration under the Act, there is substantial under-reporting of births and deaths. This is due to multiple reasons.
There is no single unified system in place for registration of births and deaths, resulting in non-availability of real time data on registration. Additionally, various sections of the RBD Act are obsolete and require amendments to accommodate societal developments of the last few decades.
Let’s take a deep dive into the current system, how it works, and the new system proposed:
Current System
The Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India (RGI) at the Central level coordinates and unifies the activities of registration throughout the country. The contemporary system is implemented by state governments/UT administrations. Accordingly, the state authority (Chief Registrar) has been declared as the chief executive authority in respective states for implementing provisions of the Act, Rules and order framed thereunder.
With a view to generate reliable and continuous data on these indicators, the Office of Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, initiated the scheme of sample registration of births and deaths in India popularly known as Sample Registration System (SRS) in 1964-65 on a pilot basis and on full scale from 1969-70.
The Sample Registration System (SRS) provides reliable annual estimates of Infant mortality rate, birth rate, death rate and other fertility and mortality indicators at the national and sub-national levels. It is a large-scale demographic survey conducted every year by Office of the Registrar General, India in all states and UTs.
How it is done?
The SRS in India is based on a dual record system. The field investigation under Sample Registration System consists of continuous enumeration of births and deaths in a sample of villages/urban blocks by a resident part-time enumerator, and an independent six-monthly retrospective survey by a full time supervisor. The data obtained through these two sources are matched. The unmatched and partially matched events are re-verified in the field to get an unduplicated count of correct events.
New system proposed
According to a recent speech by Union Home minister Amit Shah, the government will make arrangements so that as soon as a person turns 18, the Election Commission will take information from him and make his voter ID card. On the other side, in case of someone’s death, the census registrar will send the information to the Election Commission and his name will be removed from the voter’s list. The system will get automatically updated and scope of flaws and fake entries will shrink.
Other features to be introduced
The government will now conduct the census electronically, in which every person will have the right to fill the data, and it will be verified and audited, with the inclusion of over 35 parameters of socio-economic status.
Census is the process of charting the course of development of the country, and for this it is necessary that the SRS upgraded mobile application along with geofencing should create an alert system so that the officials doing the census will not go out of the allotted area.
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