Calcuttans will soon be able to collect birth or death certificates from any of the 15 borough offices, thanks to an e-networking drive by the civic body.

The first phase of e-connectivity — linking the civic headquarters on SN Banerjee Road with boroughs III (Ultadanga-Bagmari), VI (Chandni Chowk-Entally) and IX (Alipore-Ekbalpore) — is complete and will be inaugurated this month.

Links with the other boroughs will be ready by December, said municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay.

“Once the first phase is launched, people living in these borough areas will be free to collect birth or death certificates from any of the three offices. For instance, the parents of a baby born in a Bagmari nursing home can collect the birth certificate from the borough IX office in Alipore,” he explained.

Now, the certificate can be issued only by the borough III office, which covers Bagmari, on Narkeldanga Main Road.

The e-linking drive of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) is being carried out with a Rs 100-crore grant from the British government.

The CMC has already started making a computer entry of data related to births and deaths since April 1996, based on information supplied by nursing homes and government hospitals.

“Now, we are taking up a scheme to upload data related to births and deaths since August 15, 1947,” said Bandyopadhyay.

Officials, however, expressed the fear that the process might get derailed unless the hospitals, government and private, pull up their socks in supplying news about births or deaths to the civic body.

An official said all government hospitals, except Sambhunath Pandit Hospital, have been “grossly irregular” in sending the data to the CMC.

“The law states that every birth or death is to be registered according to the place of occurrence,” said chief municipal health officer Deb Dwaipayan Chattopadhyay. “If an Asansol resident gives birth to a baby in Calcutta, the birth certificate is to be issued by the CMC. Similarly, if a patient from Ranchi dies at a city hospital and the body is cremated in his home town, the death certificate is to be obtained from the CMC after producing the cremation certificate.”