KMC birth certs issued during SIR faces new govt scrutiny

Kolkata: With the new state health department deciding to investigate the birth certificates issued during SIR exercise, officials at the KMC birth certificate wing are working overtime to scrutinise all the documents that applicants had submitted to obtain birth certificates they submitted as proof. The civic authorities have temporarily suspended the chatbot service, through which the birth certificate applications were made, apparently to facilitate the state govt's probe. According to a KMC health department official, the focus of the govt investigation was on documents submitted to obtain ‘delayed registration' certificates. "The focus so far is on certificates obtained by submitting documents, citing the applicants were born at home. Certificates issued, based on such documents, might have gone to wrong hands," said a civic official.The KMC health department in Nov last year raised the daily quota of applications for birth/death certificates through a chatbot (8335999111) by citizens, who had sought the documents, hoping those would be a fitting proof of their voting right in case they were called for a SIR hearing. Mayor Firhad Hakim had at that time asked the KMC chief municipal health officer (CMHO), Ranita Sengupta, to ensure the civic body received at least 500 birth and death certificate applications daily and that those should be processed at the earliest. "At this crucial hour of proving one's citizenship, the rush to get a genuine birth or death certificate is inevitable. We should stand by citizens and bail them out amid this unnecessary SIR panic," Hakim had said.According to a post-Covid arrangement, citizens need to apply for copies of birth/death certificates through a chatbot. Amid the rush of applications for copies of birth/death certificates during the SIR exercise, citizens had pointed fingers at the ‘collapsing' chatbot service and complaints also poured in about a "very slow" document verification process, allegedly with the intention of harassing applicants and demanding a hefty amount for the free service.A KMC health department official pointed out that during that phase and the surge in applications, a middleman racket had turned active, and had spread its tentacles to the birth/death certificate wing. The official pointed out that the manual clearance system that existed before the pandemic could handle around 300 applications a day. The number got reduced to less than half after the introduction of the chatbot service, the official said, adding the online service was not doing justice to the citizens in real-time. "We received complaints from citizens about harassment being meted out to them by a section of the civic employees. We will try to ensure citizens are not harassed and if the documents that they provided are genuine, issuance of certificate should be hassle-free," the official had said. The official said police on duty outside the birth/death certificate wing should be more active in spotting middlemen who claimed to have connections and could ‘get things done' against payment of cash.