The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has been receiving close to 300 applications a day for birth and death certificates since Monday, deputy mayor Atin Ghosh said on Wednesday.
According to an official, around 250 of these applications are from people who booked appointments through the KMC’s WhatsApp-based chatbot (8335999111), while about 50 are from walk-ins. Most walk-ins are elderly residents or others who said they were unable to use WhatsApp or navigate the chatbot.
To manage the sudden surge, the civic body opened additional desks and deployed extra staff from Wednesday. Until last week, only 150 application slots were available daily. Ghosh said the number of slots has now been increased to 240 to accommodate the rising demand.
The surge follows a direction from mayor Firhad Hakim, who on Friday asked KMC officials to expand capacity in anticipation of increased demand ahead of upcoming voter list verification hearings. As part of the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR), hearings will be conducted between December 9 and January 31, 2026.
During these hearings, electors whose names cannot be linked to any relatives in the 2002 voter list may be called for verification.
Birth certificates are among the accepted identity documents, prompting many residents to apply for copies of certificates they lost years ago or never possessed. While families of newborns or recently deceased individuals can download certificates from the Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, older documents or corrections still require an application through the KMC.
“We have opened additional desks and brought in additional personnel to deal with the surge in applications,” Ghosh said. “We have increased the number of slots for receiving applications to 240.”
KMC officials added that about 12 new hands have been deputed to handle the load.
A visit to the KMC headquarters around noon on Wednesday showed long queues outside the gates. At the entrance opposite the Roxy building, two separate queues had formed — one for enquiries and another for those who had booked slots to submit applications.
Many in the lines were individuals who had never collected a birth certificate despite being born in the city decades ago. Some told Metro they had been asked to furnish the original certificate issued by the hospital at the time of birth — a document long lost — and were unsure how to proceed.
The KMC is also grappling with a steady stream of requests from various state government departments seeking verification of birth certificates, Ghosh said.
An official said such verification requests have been arriving for the last eight or nine months. “Whenever police receive a passport verification query, they approach us to confirm the person’s birth certificate. We have to search our records to determine whether we issued it,” the official said.
A senior Kolkata Police officer said the practice of verifying birth records intensified after police recovered a cache of fake birth certificates several months ago.