Kathmandu, April 20

Nepal has pledged to secure 100 per cent birth and death registration by 2024, but it is unlikely to meet this target.

As per the new census, the percentage of children below five years whose guardians/parents registered their birth was only 74 per cent.

Information Officer, Department of National ID and Civil Registration Krishna Paudel told THT his office had taken initiative to amend vital registration laws to remove gaps in them and was coordinating with the health ministry to implement a provision whereby health posts where personal events - birth and death occur- could inform the concerned ward offices which would contact family members to register those events. Paudel said there was no provision in the law to record birth of refugees' children, but as vital registration was a universal process, his office had proposed to amend the existing laws to enable refugees staying in Nepal to register births of their children.

Rights activists have urged the government to amend the National Identity Card and Registration Act to ensure that all children born in Nepal get their names and birth registration certificates without any hassle or procedural delays.

Executive Director of FWLD Sabin Shrestha said Article 39 of the constitution states that every child shall have the right to name and birth registration and yet there were procedural delays and hassles that deprived many children of their fundamental right to get their birth registered at the concerned government bodies.

Shrestha said the National Identification and Registration Act had not made government or private hospitals responsible for registering the birth of children. The Act has accepted notification of birth of a child by his/her mother but it has not given the mother the right to register their children's birth on the basis of her identity. The Act does not allow registration of new births if parents lack national identity card. This is against the constitutional guarantee of birth registration, Shrestha argued. He said the form that the service seekers fill requires police report in case the father of a child is not traced and that provision is discriminatory.

Nepal's laws need to be amended to ensure that children's birth are registered without requiring them to produce the certificates of their parents' nationality. Birth registration laws should be amended to allow service seekers to obtain birth registration from the place where the child is born, or where the child permanently resides. Birth registration laws should also apply to children of refugees and stateless persons living in Nepal, Shrestha argued.

Children should be allowed to change the names given at the time of birth if they identify themselves as different gender later. At present the law bars people from changing their birth certificates after one year.

A version of this article appears in the print on April 21, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.