Bureaucratic paperwork must not result in exclusion

Bureaucratic paperwork must not result in exclusion

The Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Bill 2026 passed in the Lok Sabha amends Section 13(3) of the 1969 Act. In the updated framework, registrations delayed for up to two years still require a district, a subdivisional or an authorised executive magistrate’s order, but when the delay exceeds two years, a judicial magistrate is required to verify the event and pass an order. The 2023 amendment rendered birth certificates the principal, in fact near-conclusive, proof of date and place of birth for school admission, voter rolls and applications for passport, Aadhaar, driving licence and government jobs. It also allowed the Centre and States to create digital databases, and required them to share data with the Registrar General. As the certificate’s gatekeeping power grew, so did the incentive to obtain one fraudulently, leading to the 2026 amendment. However, the Bill’s passage lacked debate in the Lok Sabha as the Opposition was protesting the July 20 police crackdown on the CJP protests. Since identity documents have also become more politically sensitive, moving potentially more contentious cases into courts insulates the administration from accusations that it is arbitrarily granting or refusing documentation. But while judicial scrutiny places the decision at arm’s length from the executive, erroneous decisions could prove more difficult for disadvantaged applicants to rectify.

The amendment also leaves the evidentiary rules unchanged. If the government believed executive magistrates were approving suspicious applications because the evidentiary standards were too lax, it could have prescribed more rigorous documentation, but it has not. Further, how the risk of fraudulent registrations rises after two years is unclear; the government has also not published evidence justifying a judicial magistrate’s intervention at two years or whether it considered less burdensome alternatives. For now, it appears to be a compromise based possibly on shorter delays being common enough for administrative responses to resolve. Registrations are also not infrequently delayed for valid reasons, for example because they transpired in remote areas, or undocumented migrants realised a need for educational certificates. But when identity documents become indispensable to access state support, the government’s policy instinct has been to raise the documents’ level of assurance rather than render them more accessible. In the same vein, the amendment may further a broader philosophy that, in pursuit of bureaucratic certainty, treats the wrongful exclusion of legitimate citizens as an acceptable price to minimise the risk of wrongful inclusion. And the Rajya Sabha must debate the Bill to clarify whether this trade-off is backed by sufficient evidence.