West Bengal launches crackdown on fake birth, death certificates

Kolkata: The West Bengal government has launched a massive crackdown, with statewide raids by police and officials, to root out irregularities related to fake birth and death certificates and carry out verification, chief secretary Manoj Kumar Agarwal said on Thursday.

Agarwal said a verification and rectification exercise has been launched, involving officials from the district level down to the block, municipality and panchayat levels.

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Agarwal said an integrated data-verification initiative has been initiated across all levels. Police, the district administration, the health department, panchayats and municipal administrations will work together.

The chief secretary said the old birth and death registers from all municipalities, municipal corporations and panchayats are being collected, scanned and digitised rapidly. "Once the task is completed, these records will be returned to the respective offices to ensure public services continue uninterrupted," Agarwal said.

A substantial number of fake certificates were unearthed during a recent pilot verification process. "FIRs have already been lodged in several cases and legal action has been initiated. Key government documents, including Aadhaar, passports and ration cards, are issued based on birth and death certificates. Thus, verifying the authenticity of these birth and death records is very important," Agarwal said.

Meanwhile, a stringent verification system will be introduced for issuing birth and death certificates. Certificates will be issued only after cross-verifying information against digitised records and other official documents, he added.

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The West Bengal government has also stripped the political heads of urban and rural civic authorities of the power to issue birth and death certificates. "In the entire country, West Bengal was the only state where political executives - the gram pradhan, the mayor or the chairman of a municipality - were allowed to issue birth certificates," Agarwal said. "In the rest of the country (and in West Bengal before 1997), the certificates are issued only by government officials, who can be held accountable because they are subject to departmental inquiries, verification and audits," he added.