BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court has ruled that the Registrar of Births and Deaths has the power to rectify a misspelling, if any, in the names of parents in the Birth and Death Register and that there is no time limit for correcting the names. While setting aside an endorsement issued by the Registrar of Birth and Deaths, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), refusing to carry out corrections of parents’ names entered wrongly in the Register, Justice S Sunil Dutt Yadav ordered the Registrar to carry out the corrections within six weeks.
With this direction, the court disposed of the petition filed by Sanjib Das and his wife Bina Das, residents of Lakshmipuram, Ulsoor, seeking to quash the order dated July 12, 2018 passed by BBMP Commissioner and direct the Commissioner to rectify the register of births by entering the name of ‘Sanjib Das’ instead of Sandeep Das and ‘Bina Das’ instead of ‘Beena Das’ in registration done on October 28, 2008.
The court said that the Registrar is conferred with the power to correct any error in ‘form or substance’ as regard any entry of birth or death in the register. “The names of the parents of the person who is born are also relevant entries and could be stated to be ancillary to the main entry. That is the name of the person who is born. Hence, the power of Section 15 of the Act would extend to rectifying the entries other than that of the person who is born which is found in the register,” the court said.
The petitioners are the parents of a child who was born on October 1, 2008. In the birth certificate of the child, the baby’s name was spelt correctly but the names of the mother and father were misspelt. The parents submitted a representation dated May 18, 2018 to the Commissioner, seeking correction of the spellings. However, the Commissioner’s office issued an endorsement stating that the corrections cannot be carried out as the parents did not submit the document to show that Sandeep Das and Sanjib Das are the same.