Center planning to use birth, death data to boost development process, says Amit Shah

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said the government is planning to bring a bill in Parliament to link data related to births and deaths with electoral rolls and the overall development process. Inaugurating ‘Jangnana Bhawan’, the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Shah said census is a process that can form the basis of the development agenda. Digital, complete and accurate census data will have multi-dimensional benefits, he said, adding planning based on census data ensures that development reaches the poorest of the poor.

Shah also said that proper planning of development works can be done if the data of birth and death certificates are preserved in a special way. “A bill will be introduced in Parliament to link the death and birth register with the voter list. Under this process, when a person turns 18, his or her name will automatically be included in the voter list. Similarly When a person dies, that information will automatically go to the Election Commission, which will initiate the process of deleting the name from the voter list.”

Officials said the Bill to amend the Registration of Births and Deaths Act (RBD), 1969, would also facilitate matters related to issue of driving licenses and passports and extending benefits of government welfare schemes to people, among others. “If the data of birth and death certificates is preserved in a special way, planning of development works can be done correctly by estimating the time between censuses,” he said. He said that earlier the process of development was done in piecemeal manner as sufficient data was not available for the development.

Shah said that after 70 years of independence, plans were adopted to provide electricity to every village, to provide houses to all, to provide tap water to all, to provide health care to all, to make toilets in every house. “It took so long because no one had any idea of ​​how much money would be needed to meet these basic needs, because the usefulness of the census was not visualized, the data related to the census was not accurate, the data was not available Online access and coordination with census and planning officials was absent,” he said.

“I have been involved in the development process for the past 28 years and have seen that development in our country has been demand driven. The people’s representatives who had sway could extract more benefits of development for their constituency. This is one of them. Why has our development become fragmented and more costly due to duplicity,” he said.

Along with the new Jangan Bhawan, the minister also inaugurated a web portal for registration of births and deaths. A repository of census reports, an online portal for sale of census reports and an upgraded version of the SRS mobile app with geofencing facility were also launched. Shah said the mobile app equipped with geo-fencing would ensure that the officials know that the enumerators go to the blocks assigned to them and record the data and no one can make fake entries without visiting the blocks.

This will ensure that the recorded data is accurate, he said. He said, “Census is a process that underlines the development process of a country. Hence it is very necessary to make it foolproof and faultless by using technologies like advanced version of SRS mobile app equipped with geo-fencing facility.” He said that in the next census the enumeration would be done in electronic format, where self-enumeration would also be allowed.