The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has sought additional time from the state health department to complete verification of birth certificates issued under delayed registration and digitisation processes between May last year and February.

A delayed birth registration refers to cases where a birth is officially registered more than one year after the date of birth.

KMC sources said that because birth registration was not consistently documented in earlier decades, the civic body continues to receive applications for registering births that occurred many years ago.

On May 19, the state health department asked all authorities that issue birth certificates — municipal bodies and district authorities included — to carry out "proper verification" of all digitised birth certificates and certificates issued offline between May 14, 2025, and February 28, 2026.

Following this, the department temporarily stopped issuing birth and death certificates in two categories: delayed registrations and digitised versions of manually written certificates. On May 20, KMC sources said they were unable to process new certificates for these categories on the government portal.

Digitisation of birth certificates means creating digital records of handwritten certificates.

When a digitisation application comes, civic officials have to scan their own records and see that the person's birth record is with them.

The department wanted the verification to be completed by Tuesday. Neither the KMC nor many of the district authorities were able to complete it by Tuesday.

"We have completed about 4,000 birth certificate verifications. But thousands more certificates need to be verified. We will need more time," said an official.

On May 14, 2025, the Centre sent an order to the Bengal government asking the state to identify Bangladeshi immigrants and hand them over to the BSF for deportation. The post-SIR electoral roll in Bengal was published on February 28, 2026. Over 60 lakh names were removed from the voter list and kept "under adjudication".

A KMC official said they were going through the documents submitted by applicants and checking whether details such as name and address matched the information on the birth certificates issued. They were also checking whether applicants produced a discharge certificate from the hospital where they were born, or an order from a senior district official or a court, along with the application.

“It is not possible for us to check the authenticity of the documents submitted with the application. We can only check whether the details in the issued certificate and the submitted documents match,” said an official of a district in south Bengal.

The duration for which the verification has been ordered shows that the new BJP government wanted to check whether all the certificates were issued only to genuine people, sources said.

The KMC had received more than the usual number of requests for delayed registration, digitisation and issue of duplicate certificates from people after the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll started in Bengal.

The civic body had increased the number of daily slots to receive applications for birth certificates, said sources.