The Department of Civil Registration (DoCR) has expanded the online registration of personal events like birth, death, marriage, divorce and migration in 131 local units of 48 districts as the current fiscal year nears its end. There are a total of 744 local units at present.

The online registration was launched on March 25, 2015 in an effort to modernise the civil registration system.

Limited only to 205 wards of local units until mid-March 2017, the service has since been expanded to 927 wards, according to the department. “We had the target of expanding the service to 600 wards at the end of current fiscal year. But the expansion drive accelerated well,” said Anil Kumar Thakur, director general at the DoCR.

The department said that the latest expansion means 32 percent of the population can now avail the services online.

A total of 180,163 incidents were registered by the first week of April which went upto 759,926—both through online and manual process—as of mid-March, according to Economic Survey 2016-17.

Following the government decision in the third week of March, the department has been working on expansion of the online the services in all 75 districts. The department has been installing the system in locations where required infrastructure such as internet, is available.  

Although the registration of personal events used to take place at Village Development Committees and ward offices of municipalities, the task has been assigned to the wards of rural municipalities and municipalities.

The DoCR was instituted in March 2015 as per the government’s decision on September 22, 2014 to streamline the process of registering personal events like birth, death, marriage, divorce and migration among others. Earlier, it was known as the Office of Registrar.

The country started keeping records of personal events in a more official and systematic way in 1977 as per Birth, Death and other Personal Events (Registration) Act-1976.

According to the DoCR, a total of 11.5 million events (64 percent of total personal events) have been registered so far. The government has set a target to achieve cent percent registration of such personal events by 2024.