KMC will clear all birth, death cert applications without delay: Mayor
Times of India | 1 November 2025
Kolkata: Mayor Firhad Hakim on Friday assured that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will take effective steps to tackle a surge in demand for birth and death certificates in the wake of the SIR of electoral rolls.
Hakim conceded that the queue outside the civic body's birth/death certificate wing at the KMC headquarters was getting longer after panic gripped a section of citizens over obtaining old birth certificates, which will be submitted as proof of citizenship. TOI reported on Friday how the demand for old birth and death certificates was rising in the wake of the SIR in Bengal. TOI also highlighted how some were getting trapped in a tout racket due to an abnormal delay in the issuance of birth certificates.
However, the mayor blamed the SIR scare entirely on the BJP. "The opposition in Bengal is unnecessarily pressing an SIR panic button. We are watching a surge in applications for old birth certificates. All we can say is that as long as we have Mamata Banerjee as the chief minister in Bengal, no one can snatch the rights of a genuine citizen," said Hakim. According to a source in the KMC health dept, both the mayor and the deputy mayor, Atin Ghosh, have asked the department officials to be vigilant about any sort of delay or harassment of the applicants.
A senior KMC health dept official said an order was being issued to the IT cell of the health dept to be vigilant about the rush for the birth/death certificates through a Chatbot. "We know sometimes the Chatbot services become slow as the maximum number of citizens are trying to apply for the certificates through this. We are trying to take as many applications a day as possible," said the official.
According to a post-Covid arrangement, citizens need to apply for copies of birth/death certificates through a Chatbot.
Besides pointing a finger at the ‘collapsing' Chatbot service due to the heavy rush for getting duplicate copies of birth/death certificates, citizens are also complaining about a ‘very slow' document verification process, "often done with the intention of harassing to the point an applicant is compelled to pay a hefty amount for the free service".
A KMC official conceded that taking advantage of the rush for birth/death certificates in the wake of SIR, a racket of middlemen was active. "We have been receiving harassment plaints from citizens. We will try to ensure that the citizens are not harassed and if the documents that they provide are genuine," said an official.