Birth and death registration face new hassles

The e-payment or online submission of fee for birth and death registration services has been suspended throughout the country for six months. The registration fee couldn’t be submitted online from the last week of last November. The applicants are manually paying the fees along with the application forms by visiting the local registrar’s office.

Reportedly, the e-payment feature has been kept closed for the finance ministry’s payment gateway iBAS++ system couldn’t deal with the pressure of applications for new birth and death registration certificates as well as correction in old ones.

Kazi Saifuddin Hossain, a man in his sixties from Mohammadpur area in the capital, needed his birth registration certificate for a family reasons. He submitted his application form at the councilor’s office in ward no. 32 of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) last week.

Arefin Amin Rohan (19) from the same locality has submitted applications to correct his as well as his parents’ names. He had done his birth registration back in 2015. Both of these two applicants first submitted the applications online and then came to the registrar’s office with the copies of their applications to pay the required fees of Tk 50.

Ward councilors, municipality mayors and union parishad chairmans are the ones holding the responsibility of local registrar for birth and death registrations.

Councilor of ward no. 32, Syed Hasan Noor Islam told Prothom Alo last Thursday that the e-payment option has been completely closed for the last couple of months. Those who are submitting applications are paying the fees manually by coming to the ward councilor’s office. And the money is being deposited into the state treasury through Challan.

According to ‘Office of the Registrar General, Birth and Death Registration’ records, there were total 58,749 manual payments made in a single day on 6 May. Meanwhile, there were total 69,908 applications submitted for new birth and death registration as well as for corrections in old ones that day.

There have been more than 3.2 million (32.92 lakh) birth registrations and more than 288,000 (2.88 lakh) death registrations done between January and April of the current year.

The birth and death registration fees started being collected online or through e-payment across the country from May last year. Earlier than that, the e-payment system was launched for the first time as a pilot project at Madhainagar union parishad in Siraganj’s Tarash upazila and in Meherpur municipality on 4 April last year.

In case of e-payment, the money in an automatic process goes to finance ministry’s iBAS++ system. The iBAS++ (Integrated Budget and Accounting System) is the unified budget and accounting system of the Bangladesh Government.

It’s an internet based software, through which the government performs various financial activities like budgeting, allocation, division, disbursement of money, re-adaptation of the budget, submission of bills online with provision of money through cheques or EFTs (Electronic Fund Transfer) against that, accounting of revenue deposit, automatic coordination of bank accounts and so on.

Just last year, birth registration had been a major hassle. People had to wait for months to get their hands on the certificates. The struggles were at the peak, especially from June till November.

Whenever people came for registration they would be told that the ‘server is down’. As the storage capacity of the birth and death registration system (https://bdris.gov.bd/br/application) was low, the system would get slower (better known as 'server down') due to extra pressure of applications.

Amid the weaker server management, US-based media outlet on information technology, TechCrunch on 6 July last year published a report on several hundred thousands of citizens’ personal details being leaked from a government website in Bangladesh.

After this news was published the feature of applying for birth and death registration online personally was kept suspended throughout the month of August.

Though the option of self-application was resumed from September, there arose hassle regarding e-payment. Coming to the e-payment step after filling up all the boxes on the application form, the system would get slower or the server would get down again.  

To overcome this issue, the ‘Office of the Registrar General, Birth and Death Registration’ started manual payment from 26 November of last year and began reaping its benefits. The e-payment option was completely closed down from 30 November. The registration figure reached 600,000 (6 lakh) in November and surpassed 1 million (10 lakh) in December.

When asked about the issue of e-payment being closed, registrar general Md Zahid Hossain told Prothom Alo that an average of 100,000 (1 lakh) transactions are done daily from the registrar general’s office including new applications of birth and death registration as well as corrections in old applications. The iBAS++ was failing to cope up with such a huge amount of pressure.

The e-payment option has been kept closed to keep the application process running. The manual payment method will continue till the issue has been resolved. Keeping the marginalised population in mind, the idea of keeping both the manual and online payment options of fee submission open in future is being contemplated, he added.

Secretary of DNCC ward no. 32, Zahid Ferdous told Prothom Alo that the server isn’t remaining ‘down’ anymore like before. The server remains ‘down’ for one or two days now and then. About 10 to 12 applications are submitted at their office every day.

However, registrar general Md Zahid Hossain commented that the speed of the server has not increased just from suspending the e-payment features. He said that changes have been brought in other management as well. The storage capacity of the system was increased from 72 terabytes to 322 terabytes in this April. There was 100 kilobytes of space reserved for attaching required documents along with the application form which has now been increased to 2 megabytes.

* This report appeared in the print and online versions of Prothom Alo and has been rewritten in in English by Nourin Ahmed Monisha.