A posse of impatient applicants wait outside the BMC’s birth and death certificate office in Bhubaneswar. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, March 14: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation has lived up to the age-old saying that there is many a slip between the cup and the lip.

A month ago the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) introduced digitised signature in place of the conventional practice of hand-writting it for obtaining birth and death certificates.

However, the civic body is yet to facilitate the online payment process that is required to obtain these certificates.

The civic body had launched the system expecting that it would enable faster issuance of birth and death certificates.

The new service features a digitised signature of city health officer to be put immediately after creation of the certificates.

The new system also has a text message feature to send status alerts to applicants.

However, all this is of no use as the system to deposit fees online for getting those certificates is yet to start.

As a result, the applicants are forced to visit the city health office at least twice to get the certificates. The applicants need to be physically present while submitting the application forms along with required fees and again at the time of receiving the certificates.

“Though the corporation had uploaded a link on its website for submitting applications online for birth and death certificates last year, we still have to visit the city health office to deposit the required fee. So, the online service does not make any sense,” said Jaladhar Mallick, a resident of Patia.

The civic body issues about 90 birth and death certificates every day. Once the online payment system is facilitated, the applicants need not visit the health office as they would be able to complete the entire process of applying for the certificate, depositing the required fee and downloading it by using a code generated by the system.

Last year, the corporation had made it mandatory for hospitals and nursing homes in the city to communicate online information related to births and deaths to the city health office.

Sources in the corporation said that the online payment process couldn’t be facilitated as the official website for online application of birth and death registration certificates (www.ulbodisha.gov.in) has not yet been integrated with Odisha online portal (www.odishaonline.gov.in) through which all the payments can be made.

All the online monetary transactions under the e-governance scheme are being done through the Odisha online web portal.

However, municipal commissioner Sanjib Kumar Mishra said the civic body was working out on a way to facilitate the online payment process. “We will shortly come up with an online payment system which will make the entire process for obtaining birth and death certificates hassle free,” he said.