Bengal Shifts Birth, Death Registration Authority from Local Bodies to Officials

Kolkata: The West Bengal government on Friday notified the replacement of gram panchayat pradhans and municipal body chairpersons as registrars of birth and death registrations, transferring the authority to DMs, nodal health department officers and heads of state-run hospitals.

The notification was issued a day after Chief Secretary Manoj Kumar Agarwal announced that elected representatives in rural and civic bodies will no longer have the authority to issue birth and death certificates.

Agarwal had said on Thursday that henceforth only designated government officials would be authorised to issue birth and death certificates, removing the power from all elected public representatives, in the wake of widespread discrepancies in the issuance of such documents, with many alleged irregularities surfacing during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

"Our government is continuously working to make public administration more transparent, accountable and accessible for every citizen of West Bengal. To further improve public service delivery, we have introduced key structural reforms in the Registration of Births and Deaths across the State," Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said in a post on X.

The notification, which invoked the West Bengal Births and Deaths Act, 1969, empowered the DMs to now officially function as the District Registrar of Births and Deaths, bringing centralised coordination to the district level.

The DMs have been empowered to appoint Block Medical Officers of Health (BMOH), rural and urban hospital superintendents, and medical college heads to act as registrars for all institutional births and deaths, it said.

"Dedicated government officers will now be appointed as Registrars for every Gram Panchayat and Municipality to streamline record-keeping and administrative workflows," the CM said.

"These progressive measures are designed to ensure better accuracy, efficiency and seamless service for our people," Adhikari added.

The state government has also decided to re-verify all birth and death certificates registered since 1997. Officials will conduct door-to-door verification, and any certificate found to be fake will be cancelled, the chief secretary had said on Thursday.

"The BJP supports decentralisation of power of forms; political, economic or administrative. The government has taken a step in the right direction and has our backing," Samik Bhattacharya, president of BJP Bengal unit.