Birth certificate to be issued before discharge, linked with Aadhaar in Delhi

The MCD is streamlining birth certificate issuance, providing physical copies at hospitals, integrating with DigiLocker and Aadhaar for efficiency.

New Delhi

Birth certificate to be issued before discharge, linked with Aadhaar in Delhi

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) is introducing a series of changes to the process of issuing birth certificates to streamline the regime—a physical copy of birth certificates will be provided to the parents in case of institutional births before the discharge from the healthcare facility. The civic body has also integrated the process of issuing birth certificates with DigiLocker and Aadhaar number generation, officials said.

A senior MCD official said that the scheme for providing a birth certificate for institutional births is being rolled out with the help of hospitals and clinics.

“It is a work in progress and we are expecting to achieve 100% compliance soon. In fact, more than 90% of birth cases are in institutional facilities and this will cover most of them. A free copy of the certificate will be handed over to all before they are discharged from the facility. We are already seeing healthy compliance,” the official said.

The scheme was announced by the MCD commissioner Ashwani Kumar during the budget speech last week.

According to the annual report on registration of births and deaths in Delhi (2024), the city registered a total of 306,459 births in 2024. On average, the number of births per day in Delhi worked out to 837 in 2024. “Out of the total births, 294,464 (96.09%) were institutional and 11,995 (3.91%) domiciliary in nature. 52.06% were males, 47.91% were females and 0.03% were others,” the report read.

The public health department of the municipal corporation has also completed the integration of its system with the central government’s DigiLocker. “Just like people keep their matriculation mark sheets, they can now store the authenticated copy, which will leave out any hassle of bringing original documents. Even if the MCD website crashes, this can always be accessed,” the official said.

As a third reform, the birth certificate issuance process has been integrated with the Aadhaar generation process.

“We relay the information about the birth registration to the UIDAI. It automatically generates the unique number while the staff from UIDAI visit the family and completes the remaining process,” the official explained.

The MCD has also stated that it has computerised the process of issuing cremation slips at 25 of its largest crematoria. The slip and its registration number are used for the generation of the death certificates. In Delhi, 139,480 deaths were registered during 2024, according to government data.