123 Kolkata: Marriage registrations have been suspended in Bengal from March 14 to March 24 to enable officials to shift marriage-related data from the National Data Center (NDC) to State Data Center (SDC). Earlier, the data uploaded on the state marriage portal were stored by NDC, which is a cloud-enabled data centre under National Informatics Center (NIC). Till now, this was free. According to state officials, from Apr 1, 2025, to store the data in the NDC, the Bengal govt has to shell out Rs 14 lakh per month, which amounts to Rs 1.7 crore a year.
The state has now decided to host the data in its own SDC, which has been extensively scaled up as part of the Mission Mode Project under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), or Digital India. This will help save costs.
"We selected this period for data migration from NDC to SDC as few marriages are conducted in the month of Chaitra," an official said. The wedding season is set to start again from Apr 15, with the beginning of Baishakh. "We have informed all marriage registrars across Bengal that all applications, notices for marriages, marriages, and corrections can be done online from March 25. No one can access the portal now," the official said.
Bengal already uses cloud-based storage for all marriage-related data. The data related to all weddings registered online between Dec 1, 2018 and Jan 1, 2024, were already uploaded on the cloud-based storage. The state started the process of digitising all marriages from July 2024. The earliest records date back to around 1858. Before digitisation, all physical marriage-related files were stacked in five record rooms — four in Kolkata and the fifth in Murshidabad.