According to the Registrar General’s Department, it was reported that a proposal has been tendered to remove the ‘ethnicity from the birth certificate.

Registrar General Prabath Abeywickrama said Sinhala, Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, Malay, and Indian origins are currently used in the birth certificate, will be removed from the document.

He points out that this proposal has been presented considering the issues prevalent in the society itself as well as the issues faced internationally, and there have been objections to the removal of nationality from various parties.

Steps have been taken to make some other amendments to the birth certificate according to the internationally accepted norms. Accordingly, a birth certificate can be obtained in one’s mother tongue, but steps have been taken to issue it in Sinhala, Tamil and English languages in the future.

“Therefore, there would be no need to translate the document again when going abroad. The Registrar General said, it contains some safety provisions and that steps have been taken to add the National Identity Card (NIC) number, which is given at birth, to the NIC issued when a person turns 15 years.

Nevertheless, nationality could be included if desired. The information about the father and the parents’ marital status will not be included.

As the society has seen several issues with this, it has been removed, and the birth certificate will be released as a single page.

Currently, the program is being conducted as a pilot project in seven Divisional Secretariat offices. Next year, steps will be taken to issue the new national birth certificate in 100 divisional secretariat offices, the Registrar General said.

The new birth certificate will be simplified by preventing surfacing of fake birth certificates, eliminating the need for translation, and removing details about whether the parents had been married or not.

Accordingly, Abeywickrama said these efforts will be made to provide an internationally recognized new birth certificate to the Sri Lankan citizens in the future.

Source – Dailymirror