Software shift: Issuance of birth, death certificates hit

K Pandian, a resident of K Abishekapuram zone, has been running from pillar to post for the past three weeks to get a spelling corrected in his son's birth certificate. After making frequent visits to the zonal office from the main office of the city corporation, he has now been asked to wait for a week more to get the correction done.
Pandian is one among the over 2,000 applicants in the four zones of the city corporation waiting for corrections to be made in birth certificates. While the process would usually take not more than a week, the delay in migrating to the common web-based software has affected basic services to the citizens including issuance of birth and death certificate from the city corporation.

While the civic body maintains that the issue would be sorted out in a week those in urgent need of birth and death certificates have been seriously affected by the delay. The new system is expected to bring the entire financial system of the 12 city corporations in the state and their developmental activities under the direct supervision of the Commissionerate of Municipal Administration (CMA).
Besides dedicated windows for all the 12 city corporations, the new system is secured with Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) linked to the government data centre at Perungudi. Trichy was selected as a pilot city with the integrated software coming into being on September 1. But migration wasn't smooth as many of its features were yet to be made fully functional. A technical team has come to Trichy from CMA Chennai for deputation to sort out the issue.
"Only property tax and water charges module are rectified in the new interface. The worst affected are those who have sought birth and death certificates," said a senior corporation official. The format of application to apply for birth and death certificates is entirely different from the previous system. "The list of newborns from various hospitals has to first reach the respective city corporation offices. This has to be further uploaded to the software. In the new system, the application has to be uploaded using a scanner," said a health department official.
Certificates are being issued for emergency cases at the main office of the city corporation. However, all the four zones are receiving at least a hundred applications daily. There are about 2,000 applications already pending, said the official. The issue has been prevailing throughout the state which is expected while migrating to a better technology, the official added.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/trichy/software-shift-issuance-of-birth-death-certificates-hit/articleshow/60704764.cms