Toward Universal Civil Registration: The RBD (Amendment) Act 2023

CURRENT AFFAIRS | 14 JULY 2026

India has quietly pulled off one of its biggest data-governance turnarounds: in 2024 it officially recorded more than 99% of its estimated births and deaths, up from barely half a decade earlier. The engine behind the leap is the Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023.

The latest Civil Registration System (CRS) data, released by the Registrar General of India (RGI), shows birth registration touching 99.4% and death registration 99.9% in 2024. Just ten years earlier, in 2014, only about 56% of births and 48% of deaths were being registered. That is a transformation from a leaky, paper-based habit into something close to universal civil registration — a benchmark long treated as a marker of a mature state.

The legal spine of this system is the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, which first made reporting every birth and death legally compulsory within 21 days of the event. But compulsion on paper is not the same as coverage on the ground. The 2023 amendment changed the plumbing: it digitised and centralised registration into a real-time national database maintained by the RGI under the Union Home Ministry, and — most consequentially for citizens — elevated the birth certificate into a single, foundational document.

That single certificate can now be used for admission to educational institutions, issuing a driving licence, preparing or updating the electoral roll (EPIC), Aadhaar enrolment, marriage registration, appointment to government jobs and a host of other services. In effect, the birth certificate becomes a gateway to rights and entitlements, sitting alongside Aadhaar and DigiLocker as a piece of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).

Yet the headline number hides real fault lines. Demographers such as Moradhwaj Dhakad of the Max Planck Institute caution that 84.2% of registered infant deaths were urban against only 15.8% rural — a skew that almost certainly reflects under-registration of rural infant deaths rather than a true mortality gap. Timely registration within the 21-day window and the quality of medical certification of the cause of death still lag, and India could usefully add a system to record internal migration. States like Kerala, Goa and several UTs reached near-universal coverage decades ahead of the pack, underlining that the national average masks persistent regional disparities.

The 99% milestone is a genuine achievement, but the next frontier is quality and equity of registration — not just the count, but the accuracy and reach behind it.