CHENNAI: Birth and death certificates of everybody born in the city have been uploaded online by the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) and can be accessed by simply punching in a date and gender.
After filling the two basic details, one gets a list of all persons born or dead on that particular day. One can even download anybody’s certificate in PDF format. The scheme, introduced in 2008, to bring about digitisation has met with criticism from many quarters.
Information such as mother’s name, father’s name, permanent address, hospital (birth and death) will easily be available online. Since most passwords or answers to other forms of security questions are a combination of these details, it could give away a lot of information about a person. On the other hand, it also gives easy access to information to those who want to forge certificates.
“Forgery of death certificates plays an important role in land grabbing cases,” said Gopala Guru, an inspector with the Chennai City Police’s central crime branch who handles forgery cases. He says in many cases birth certificates were used in real estate fraud cases.
“My mother had purchased land in Varadarajapuram near Mudichur from a lady and the patta was transferred to my mother’s name immediately. About a decade later, when we applied for an encumbrance certificate before selling the property, we found that her son had sold our property illegally to 13 other people,” said Ramakrishnan R, a small realtor in the city. “When we approached him, he said he had nothing to do with it. The police then found that land-grab mafia, headed by a man known as Kamraj, had forged the woman’s death certificate and her son’s ID proof and sold the property illegally,” he rued, adding that he was unsure how the mafia had gotten hold of such details.
While forged certificates have been used in land-grab cases, media reports from the past also suggest that these certificates have been used to illegally enjoy the benefits of welfare schemes. In Trichy, for example, the CBCID had reportedly busted forgery mafia that supplied bogus certificates to nearly 300 people to enable them to get pending claims and welfare schemes available to the relatives of dead family members, from various government departments including labour and social welfare.
The GCC deputy commissioner of health, M Vijayalakshmi, IAS, denied that people misuse the website for forgery.
“If the police identify a case of forgery, we’ll be able to track the IP address of those who downloaded the certificate,” the official said, adding that publishing birth and death certificates and making them accessible without severe security is within legal limits of Section 17 of the Registration Act.