Birth certificate errors cause suffering at every step

Kaniz Fatema’s 11-year-old son is in Class-V at a school in the capital and will sit for the scholarship examination this year. As part of the preparations for the examination, the school asked for birth registration certificates in both Bangla and English last month. She had obtained her son’s birth certificate in 2015 only in English. So, when she went to the Birth and Death Registration website to obtain the certificate in both languages, she found his name written in Bangla with strange characters. Her husband’s name was also written as something which does not convey any meaning.

Last Sunday, several people were also found at Zone-4 office of Dhaka North City Corporation (Mirpur-10) seeking corrections after falling victim to similar name mix-ups.

A man named Mizanur Rahman had gone there to correct someone else’s birth certificate. The applicant’s mother’s name, Shahana, had been written as ‘DTKKA’. Another man, Nasir Ahmed Belal, said his elder daughter’s English name had been entered incorrectly. In place of his and his wife’s names, ‘LJKLJF’ had been entered.

The victims said they had not made these mistakes; the errors had been made at the registration office.

The birth certificates of the eight people interviewed for this report were issued before 2020. The hassle of correcting mistakes made by registration offices has fallen on the affected citizens. Registration officials, meanwhile, said they had been correcting such strange errors in names for several years. However, they said citizens’ lack of awareness was also responsible for mistakes occurring now.

Amid such challenges, today, Tuesday (6 October), marks the National Birth and Death Registration Day. This year’s theme is “Accurate Registration, Ensuring Good Governance.”

According to data from the Office of the Registrar General (Birth and Death Registration), more than 5.32 million births were registered across the country in the eight months from January to August 2026. During this period, around 3.5 million birth registrations, both new and old, were corrected. More than 578,000 deaths were registered and around 4,500 corrections were made. Last year, around 7.9 million certificates were corrected.

The government-fixed fee for correcting errors in names and addresses in birth and death registration is Tk 50. Accordingly, citizens paid Tk 175 million in correction fees during the eight months of this year. Last year, affected citizens paid more than Tk 395.8 million to correct errors in names and addresses.

However, those like Nasir Ahmed who apply for corrections through computer shops have to bear additional costs. He said he paid Tk 300 to a shop employee to apply for corrections to his two daughters’ birth certificates. He asked, “Why do I have to bear responsibility for a mistake I did not make, and why do I have to suffer?”

According to registration office officials, such errors generally originate from applications seeking a certificate in only one of the two languages, Bangla or English. Three years ago, there was no initiative to issue certificates in Bangla and English simultaneously.

Suppose a person requested only an English certificate. They either applied by going to the registration office or through a shop, or paid someone to arrange the certificate. At the registration office, only the English section of the application form was filled out to issue the English certificate. Something was typed into the Bangla section.

As a result, although the English certificate came out correctly, the name and address were incorrect on the Bangla certificate. The same mistake occurred with the English names of those who obtained only Bangla certificates.

However, the burden of correcting these registration errors is falling on the affected citizens. Birth certificates are now issued in Bangla and English together on a single page. Therefore, an error in either language means the entire birth certificate is incorrect. It cannot be used without being corrected.

In areas under city corporations such as Dhaka, an affected person has to go through four steps to make such a correction. First, an application has to be submitted online for correction. The application then has to be taken to the local councillor’s office or the relevant zone office of the city corporation.

After the application is accepted there, it goes to the deputy director of the Local Government Division working on behalf of the deputy commissioner, through his registered account. After he approves it, it comes back to the local councillor’s office or zone office.

Although the entire process is online, applicants have to visit these offices at different stages. In the case of union parishads (UPs), the process goes from the UP to the office of the upazila nirbahi officer (UNO) and then back to the UP.

Several other parents at the school attended by Kaniz Fatema’s son said they had also faced such confusion over Bangla names. A woman, Farzana Rahman, said her child’s name had appeared as gibberish on the certificate. The names of her husband, daughter and herself had all appeared in similarly strange forms. Another woman, Tuhina Akhter, said her daughter’s name was correct in Bangla. But in the places for her and her husband’s names, only ‘0’ and ‘–’ had been entered.

All three parents said the school had temporarily accepted the previous birth certificates in English because most of the scholarship candidates would need corrections to their names. The school asked them to submit the birth certificates in Bangla later. The parents are now considering making the corrections. They said they were worried simply thinking about the number of steps they would have to go through.

Another victim, Mohammad Amir Hossain, told Prothom Alo at the Zone-4 office that he had faced further complications while trying to correct his sister’s birth certificate. The birth registration was done in 2008. Her address in Ibrahimpur had previously been under Zone-7 of the city corporation.

The authorities have now brought the area under Zone-4. In that case, his sister’s birth registration should automatically have been transferred to Zone-4. But instead, it appears in both zones, and both records are full of errors.

He has now been running around for seven days to have the zone transferred while trying to correct the errors. Expressing his frustration, he asked, “Why do we have to suffer because of the authorities’ mistake?”

An official concerned, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an analysis in 2023 had found that there were around 100 million errors in Bangla certificates alone. The registration offices were entirely responsible for these errors. At the time, it was recommended that registration offices apologise to citizens and invite them to come to have the errors corrected free of charge. But government officials did not agree. Their view was that this was an individual’s information, and the individual should apply for its correction.

Suffering over birth registration corrections is widespread. This correspondent also had to have their own and their children’s birth certificates corrected. The registration office had entered misspellings and arbitrary names in Bangla on certificates that had been obtained in English.

Speaking as an expert, ABM Zubair, executive director of Progga (Knowledge for Progress), said he too had gone through such a correction process even though the mistake was not his. The research and consultancy organisation Progga works on birth and death registration.

ABM Zubair told Prothom Alo that it is frequently heard that such mistakes by registration offices are “intentional.” There are allegations that this is a trap to “make money.” The more mistakes there are, the more often citizens will come to have them corrected, and an unscrupulous group will earn money each time. If the citizens’ costs for each correction are calculated, the amount becomes enormous collectively.

According to data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), around 67 per cent of children in the country are born at healthcare facilities. ABM Zubair believes that requiring these facilities to register children immediately after birth could reduce the rate of errors and the suffering of citizens. For this, he believes the Births and Deaths Registration Act, 2004 needs to be amended.

Asked about the current errors and suffering, including strange errors in names, Registrar General (Additional Charge) of the Office of the Registrar General, Birth and Death Registration Abu Nasar Mohammad Abdullah told Prothom Alo that they have been having to correct such old mistakes for several years.

A birth certificate is an international document. Essentially, the government began issuing Bangla and English certificates together in 2023 to modernise birth certificates in line with developed countries and prevent fraud in obtaining visas.

Birth registration is also part of the government’s “One Citizen, One ID, One Wallet” initiative. Therefore, only those whose birth registrations are accurate will benefit from the government’s digitalised good governance, he added.

Citizens also need to be aware of this. Errors will be reduced if people apply for registration themselves rather than having someone else submit applications on their or their children’s behalf, he advised.