Express Impact: Mother’s name now a must to download birth certificate from PMC site

The birth certificate download tab on the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) website has been modified to make the mother’s name a compulsory field, after a report by The Indian Express in September showed that the website allowed mass downloads of birth certificates by just entering the date of birth. Manisha Naik, assistant medical officer of Health at PMC’s Health Department, confirmed that the change was made  after the report was published.

The report had exposed a contradiction in the procedure to attain a birth certificate at PMC offices and the website. To collect a birth certificate from a PMC office, a citizen needs to provide ID as well as prove their relation to the person whose birth certificate is to be collected. However, the earlier version of the website allowed any citizen to download the birth certificate of any other citizen. Entering a date of birth on the website displayed birth certificates of all citizens born on that day in the city.

Now, entering the date of birth along with the mother’s name in Marathi has been made a compulsory field (denoted by an asterisk) on the website. In September, Naik had told The Indian Express that the suggestion to make the mother’s name a compulsory field was a good suggestion and could be incorporated. Accordingly a few weeks later the change was introduced.

Naik now said that records of all birth certificates available with the PMC from the 1960s onwards are available for download on the website. “It took us 4-5 years to digitise all the data. Earlier we used to have a data entry person filling in all new birth data collected from the hospitals but now we have provided the hospitals with a login and they fill the data themselves which is then validated by us.” She said that this has made the data uploading process much faster and even new birth certificates are available after a dozen or so days.