The High Court of Karnataka has directed the Chief Commissioner of Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and the Secretary of the E-governance Department of the State government to evolve a system of verifying the identification and details of people on their death based on e-KYC like usage of Aadhaar, etc., to make death certificate free from data entry errors.
Also, the Court said certificates like birth and death certificates are credentialised and digitised to enable e-verification and to be used in the DigiLocker application so that any third party or any authority before whom such certificates are produced, can easily verify the same to be genuine or not.
Justice Suraj Govindaraj issued the directions while allowing a petition filed one Sai Lakshmi, wife of late Lakshmi Kantha S.P. of Bagepalli in Chickballapur district. Petitioner’s husband had died at Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology in November 2022 and the BBMP had issued a death certificate based on the information uploaded in the e-janma portal by the hospital.
She had questioned the refusal of BBMP’s registrar of births and deaths to correct her name and the names of the father and mother of her husband in the latter’s death certificate. The BBMP had in January 2023 asked her to approach the competent court to carry out corrections even though she had submitted the original medical certificate, family certificate, Aadhaar, Voter ID of all the members.
However, the High Court held that Rule 11 of the Karnataka Registration of Birth and Death Rule, 1999 empowers the registrars of births and deaths to make necessary enquiry and correct any clerical or formal error which has been made in the register, and there was no need for the citizens to approach the courts.
Errors
In case of the petitioner, there was no error in the name of her husband entered in the death certificate. However, the names of the father and the mother of the deceased were entered wrongly as ‘late P. Reddanna’ instead “late Peddanna’ and ‘Vijaya Lakshmi Kantha’ instead of ‘Vijaya Lakshmi’ respectively. Even petitioner’s name was entered as ‘Peddanna’ instead of “Sai Lakshmi.’
As birth and death certificates are essential certificates for various purposes, it would be of paramount importance that these certificates are issued in a proper manner without errors and not to make a citizen to knock the doors of the court for correcting minor errors occurred during entry of data into software system, the Court observed.
