Free birth certificates from Wednesday

When the Registrar General’s Department (RGD) of the Ministry of Legal Affairs launches the Free Birth Certificate Programme in the next week it will be a culmination of almost ten years of work, which began since July 1994.

This programme, which is part of an automated Civil Registry in the establishment of this country’s Population Registration System (PRS), will be implemented on a phased basis with the issuing of free computer-generated birth certificates to children born from 1984 to present (2003), in the first instance. In this group of children 18 years and under, special consideration will be given to Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) students scheduled to write the examination in 2004. The RGD will work with principals, SEA teachers, and parents over the next three months to have these certificates available by mid September 2003. Children of the employees of the Ministry of Legal Affairs born after 1984, however, will be the first to receive their computerised certificates on Wednesday June 25 in a function at the Ministry, while the programme launch will take place on Wednesday July 2, 2003. The promise of free birth certificates was made during the budget debate of 2002/2003 and forms part of Government’s Social and Economic Policy Framework in its effort to improve service delivery to the population.

The proposal is for the first copy of these computer-generated birth certificates to be issued free to citizens as a social relief measure, and as an incentive to parents in order to lessen the incidence of non-registration of births. Until the launch of the second phase in January 2004, which entails the issuing of free computer-generated certificates to those people born before 1984, persons requesting their hand-written certificates will be required to pay the $25 fee for the service under the existing system. It was in July, 1994 Cabinet authorised the Registrar General’s Department to develop a PRS, which will serve as a means of uniquely identifying each member of the population of Trinidad and Tobago using a personal identification number (PIN). This project entails the establishment of an electronic register of the entire population. The PRS is critical to the progress of reforms in the Health Sector, since an essential prerequisite for the National Health Insurance System (NHIS) is the capability to uniquely identify each citizen. Other agencies that will benefit from the PRS are Central Statistical Office, Elections and Boundaries Commission, Board of Inland Revenue, National Insurance Board and Social Welfare Division, and the Transport Division of the Ministry of Works.

The main advantage of the PRS is, therefore, the fact that it can serve as the authorised civil government database providing all agencies and the public at large with basic information, eliminating data redundancy, duplication of efforts and unofficial sources of information. Other advantages include the fact that the PRS, if properly maintained, can generate up-to-date valid listings of the population, thereby reducing the need for island-wide censuses and produce precise population statistics on completely up-to-date information without significant expenditure. The establishment of the PRS required the procurement, installation and testing of suitable hardware, software and related equipment as well as the training of the staff to operate these systems.

In 1997, Cabinet agreed to the awarding of a contract to NIPDEC to facilitate automation of the Civil Registry and the development of a Population Registration System. This aspect led to two contracts being awarded to Fujitsu-ICL (Fujitsu) — one to supply hardware, operating software and customised application software, and the other to convert the records of the Civil Registry into an electronic environment to be integrated with the application software as customised. In April 2002, NIPDEC handed over the application software, installed hardware and software to the Minister of Legal Affairs, Camille Robinson-Regis. The Civil Registry comprises all records of births, adoptions, marriages, divorces and adoption. The new system can link a person’s birth, adopting, marriage, divorce, and death and is expected to provide information through quick searches in a more secured manner. During the development stages Civil Registry data was entered for 65 years of birth, 30 years of deaths, Muslim and Hindu Marriages, Muslim divorces and 65 years of civil marriages. At present, the database comprises about three million records of births, deaths, marriages, Muslim divorces and adoptions.