MARGAO
Are old birth records, pertaining to the period 1914-1970 now available online at the click of a mouse? For the moment, Shastikars can only hope to receive a "teor" of the old birth records at the click of a mouse, but will have to wait for some time to lay their hands on the birth certificates online.
For, if officials are to be believed, a host of spelling mistakes or names spelt incorrectly has been detected in these digitized records and it will take some time before a call is taken on the issuance of these records online.
To tide over the problem and work out a mechanism to correct the spelling mistakes, a joint meeting of the State Registrar, Archives and the Director of Planning and Statistics and other concerned officials has been convened in the first week of January how to go about in issuing the birth certificates of the period 1914-1970 online.
When The Goan visited the office of the Salcete Sub Registrar to find whether the work of issuing computerized copies have eased the situation, Sub registrar Chandrakant Pissurlekar pointed out that only ‘teor' will be issued to the citizens, as the office has still not received order from the Director of Planning and Statistics to issue computerized birth certificates pertaining to the period 1914-1970. "The Salcete office has received the digitized records of the old birth records pertaining to the year 1914-1970. We have issued ‘teors' at the click of the mouse since the last one week, but the process of issuing computerized birth certificates have not started for want of an order from the Director Planning and Statistics", Pissurlekar said.
When The Goan contacted State Registrar Ashutosh Apte to shed light on the delay by the Sub Registrars to issue online copies of birth certificates of the period 1914-1970, he said a joint meeting of officials of three department, Registration, Archives and Planning and Statistics will do a post-mortem of the entire exercise after taking stock of the feedback received from various sub-registrar offices. "We have come across a number of spelling mistakes in the birth certificates issued online, indicating that the mistakes were committed at the time to data feeding. Issuing the birth records with the mistakes in names may throw up a problem of host for the departments", Apte said.
Officials in the know said one way to address the problem of mistakes in the names is to make the corrections at the taluka offices with the help of supporting documents produced by the applicants. "It will involve huge time and energy to correct the mistakes centrally. The best option to overcome the problem is to correct the names at the taluka Sub registrar offices by asking the applicants to produce supporting documents", remarked another official.
Office of taluka Sub-Registrars, especially Salcete Sub Registrar, have been witnessing huge queues for the old birth records, in respect of the period 1914-1970 since many of these records, more so records of the period between 1965-69 have been left damaged, torn and mutilated for want of upkeep and maintenance by the authorities.
