The sight of students going to school is painful to Rabindra. Not because he is envious of them, but because he regrets not being one of them.

Rabindra, 17, was a sharp student, always coming first or second in his class. Everything was perfect until grade seven. But during enrollment in grade 8, the school administration asked him to produce a birth registration certificate. He couldn’t and the school refused to admit him.

“Once I wanted to be a pilot,” he says. “Now I am a helper in my mother’s panipuri stall… The state has ruined my life.”

Rabindra’s father, Bhanu, fled his home in his youth, from Parsa to Kathmandu, in search of a better life. He started staying in the Pashupatinath area, where he worked for a flower vendor. There, he found his life partner, Sita, who was also from Madhesh. They lived in makeshift houses in the Bankali area and had four children.

Bhanu passed away early, leaving all the responsibility of raising children on his wife. Bhanu and Sita had no vital registrations—birth registration, citizenship or marriage registration—as they had left their houses in their youth against their parents’ wishes. They didn’t consider it necessary to get these registrations.

Their children are now paying the price, none of whom has birth registration or citizenship.

All four were born and raised in Kathmandu Metropolitan City-8. The residents in the locality have known them since their childhood. Even the Pashupati Development Trust is ready to verify. But the ward office remains unconvinced. Rabindra, his mother, and siblings have made several attempts to register their births, but to no avail.

After failing in their individual capacity, they sought help from Sath Sath, an organisation working for the rights of children and youth. Its efforts have also failed.

“The ward officials say so many people [and not just Nepalis] live in the Pashupati area,” said Indira Neupane, an officer at Sath Sath. “They cannot risk certifying those without any documentation. The ward officials have asked them to go to their place of origin [Bhanu’s hometown] to get the registration.”

Rabindra made futile travels to different places in the districts to retrace his ancestral roots from his father’s side. By the time he had established a link with the maternals, they had already migrated to India. Thus, he was unable to get legal documentation from the maternal side as well.

The trouble Rabindra has faced is far from unique. Thousands of children born to parents without documentation, even as they are Nepali, have no birth registration. This means they are deprived of education. Their plight reveals deep-rooted administrative and bureaucratic hurdles, a long-standing gap between the policy and practice and the irresponsible nature of the state to its people.

Without birth registration, Rabindra was unable to get citizenship. In Nepal, a citizenship certificate is essential not only for dealing with government offices but also for basic day-to-day activities, including purchasing a mobile SIM card, opening a bank account, or buying an insurance policy.

“Even private job-search agencies demand citizenship before they will help you find basic jobs like that of a waiter or a security guard,” Rabindra says.

After being turned away from school enrollment, he tried to learn vocational skills, hoping to secure employment. “But I dropped the idea after the agencies told me that citizenship is a must to secure a job,” he adds. “It feels like every door is closed to me. I have already lost hope for anything better in life.”

Children born to parents without legal documentation, families living on the streets and migrants are the most vulnerable populations to be rejected for registration. Many of these children don’t have living parents and are unaware of their ancestral roots.

Rights advocates say successive governments have failed to devise a proper solution, even though constitutional provisions are largely progressive.

Nepal ensures constitutional guarantees and is party to binding international conventions to ensure no child is without documentation. Article 39 of the Constitution of Nepal clearly states that every child has the right to a name, birth registration, and identity.

Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Nepal is a party, states that ‘everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.’ The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child also ensures the right to acquire the certification.

“The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality,” reads Article 7 of the convention. It also makes the State Parties responsible for ensuring the implementation of these rights.

“The registration officers [ward officers] must honour the constitutional spirit and Nepal’s international obligations,” says Ram Bahadur Chand, an officer at the Child Rights Council, a state agency entrusted with protecting and promoting child rights. “Their one decision can change an individual's life.”

He says the spirit of the constitution and the Act Relating to Children is that children have every right to birth registration.

The council regularly gets requests from children or their guardians to facilitate registration. In most cases, it writes to the respective local units, urging them to provide the documents. While some act on the requests, others refuse to do so.

Many rights advocates agree with Chand that most problems will be solved if officials and local representatives start empathising with children’s plights. They say the problem is that they are guided more by the National Identity Card and Civil Registration Act and its regulations.

The Act says that in the informant’s absence (in the absence of the child’s parents), the assigned person can provide (necessary) information for the registration. Defining who can be the informant (guardian), the corresponding regulation says, “In the absence of an informant for birth registration, the concerned ward chairperson at the local level must provide the information required for the registration.”

Kabita Rajya Shah, resource executive at Sath Sath, says that of late, the ward chairpersons have started becoming informants for the abandoned children without their parents. However, they are reluctant to do so for those who have already crossed 16 years of age or have one parent alive.

Hikmat, 22, is yet another example of how the state’s indifference to recognising its own citizens can ruin somebody’s life. Like Rabindra’s parents, his father and mother had fled their respective places and met in Kathmandu. Eventually, they got married and had two children, both born in the Koteshwor area.

They left their homes at an early age without acquiring citizenship. As daily wage workers, they didn’t need to produce their legal documents, so they never needed to get them in their short lives (both died before they were 50). However, that had far-reaching consequences in the lives of their children—Hikmat and his brother.

“Our parents were unaware, and I was too young to realise the need for the birth registration certificate so long as my father was alive,” says Hikmat. “I was not admitted to the school due to a lack of a certificate. Without education, I am a daily wage worker in a Pasmina factory.”

After being denied admission at a Balkumari-based public school, he left no stone unturned to get the certificate, making several attempts at Ward 32 of Kathmandu Metropolitan City. When it refused, he travelled to Okhaldhunga to trace his ancestral lineage, but couldn’t.

After contacting several persons, he could trace his maternal roots in Gorkha. Though he and his maternal uncles made several tries for the registration from his mother’s side, the local administrations refused. “In Gorkha, I was told to try where my father came from,” he says. “But I don’t know the exact place where my father was born. Neither do I know other relatives from his side.”

Hikmat says everyone in his surroundings knows he and his brother were born to Nepali parents in the Koteshwar area and raised there. The locals are even ready to verify that, but not so the officials.

Yubraj Kattel, director general at the Department of National Identity Card and Civil Registration, said the problem is that most officials tend to follow the letter rather than the spirit of the laws.

“I don’t see legal hurdles in registering births of persons like Rabindra or Hikmat,” Kattel says. “But they have been denied because officials at the local level only see the words in the civil registration Act, which say they can be informants of those who don’t have parents. They are indifferent to the constitutional spirit and Nepal’s international obligations.”

Katted adds, “What is the problem in registration when locals from the very community where the children were born are ready to vouch for them?”

Those advocating for rights to birth registration have similar experiences. They say even when two children have the same legal condition, one local unit with a “progressive mindset” registers while another refuses, citing the law and claiming they do not want to face legal actions.

Those who have long experience in rights advocacy say the deprivation of birth registration is not a problem affecting only a few people.

Milan Dharel, former executive director of the National Child Rights Council, says the number of children waiting for the certificate is easily more than 5,000. “This is a long-standing national predicament that demands an urgent solution,” he says. “We cannot leave thousands of our children to waste their precious time trying to get a document the state is obliged to provide.”

At least 300 applications have been registered with the council itself. Chand, the council officer, says several of them have already reached the age to acquire citizenship.

With problems galore, the council is preparing to open a call to everyone deprived of legal documentation to bring their issues to the council. “We would like to profile their problems and bring out the real picture,” he says. “It will bring the issue to the national discourse and exert some pressure on policy makers. The state should realise there is a mismatch between its commitment and action.”

For instance, Nepal, under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9, has guaranteed legal identification for all, including birth registration, by 2030. It recognises that legal identity is the foundation for accessing rights, services, and protections, and is essential to reducing statelessness, inequality and social exclusion.

The goal has been integrated into the 15th national periodic plan to ensure 100 percent birth registration in the next five years.

According to rights activists, achieving the SDG goal and the 15th periodic plan target is not possible without changing the bureaucratic mindset, ending legal ambiguity and increasing public awareness.

Lack of documentation does not just affect an individual; it perpetuates across generations. “There are three generations from the same family without documents,” says Shah, the resource executive at Sath Sath. “They are living miserable lives.”

She says that over the years, her organisation has successfully registered the births of dozens of undocumented children. In many cases, the organisation could also secure citizenship certificates for them: first by persuading local officials to show flexibility, and in other cases by taking the fight to the courts. These efforts, she says, have allowed several children and young adults to finally gain recognition. However, the process is slow and exhausting, and nor is it possible to take every case to court.

“No birth registration means no citizenship. These people will be stateless without citizenship. Scores of them have already crossed 16 years—making them eligible for citizenship,” says Dharel, who is also the South Asia coordinator and board member of Global March Against Child Labour.

Different reports have exposed how statelessness remains a huge problem in Nepal. In 2013, the Forum for Women, Law and Development (FWLD) published a report which concluded that by July 2011, 4.3 million Nepalis aged 16 and above lacked citizenship certificates—representing nearly a quarter of the total population at the time.

But more recent assessments suggest the situation has only worsened. In its 2023 human rights report, the United States State Department estimated that 6.7 million individuals in Nepal lacked citizenship documentation. While the majority of these people may technically be eligible for citizenship under Nepali law, without paperwork, they remain excluded from essential rights and opportunities.

The report highlighted how citizenship documents, which are issued at age 16, are prerequisites for almost every aspect of public life from registering to vote, getting married, buying or inheriting land, enrolling in higher education, sitting for professional exams, applying for civil service jobs, opening bank accounts to even accessing state-provided social benefits.

Without documentation, individuals are denied fundamental freedoms and entitlements. Stateless persons often face discrimination in employment, education, housing, health services and even relief programs after disasters such as earthquakes. Their lives become a continuous negotiation for survival, marked by restrictions at every turn, according to the report.

The Nepali authorities dismiss the scale of the problem, saying it is exaggerated. However, evidence from the ground, backed by research and lived realities, makes it clear that statelessness remains one of Nepal’s most pressing and under-addressed challenges.

Shah argues that the solution could be as simple as adhering to a basic principle: “They should be given a certificate from where they were born.”

She says continued lobbying from different quarters will definitely take the country to that point, as the law to grant citizenship in the mother's name is in the final stage of coming into force. The need, coupled with advocacy, will make it possible one day for every child to get birth registration without much struggle, she says.

Chand, the official at the council, also believes the problem is not insurmountable.

“It can be resolved,” he says. “The government can act through a Cabinet decision or by enacting a clear law. First, a proper database of undocumented people should be prepared. Then, the Cabinet can decide to give them birth certificates. After that, the government must adopt a policy to register every child at the place of their birth. That would align Nepal’s practice with its constitutional commitments.”

Officials, however, point to the complexities of implementation. Kattel, director general of the National Identity Department, says that his office has been conducting frequent orientations to encourage flexibility among staff working in vital registration.

“We are conducting orientations for our staff. However, several registration authorities are local government staff, not ours. We cannot direct them,” Kattel explained. “I agree that there are problems, but things are better than before.”

However, activists argue that the constitutional spirit and Nepal’s international obligations leave no room for partial solutions. The state must ensure that no one is left without registration or recognition. They say it is about acknowledging that every child born in Nepal deserves an identity, dignity, and equal rights.

The human cost of this failure is borne by those directly affected. “Is it my fault that I was born to undocumented parents? I did not commit any crime, yet I pay the price,” says Ramesh, who has also been deprived of the birth registration despite being born and brought up in Kathmandu.