Four years on, the MCD’s online birth and death registration system manages nearly 1,200 entries every day; functions across 12 zones; serves a population of 1.38 crore; and is still managed by a single server. And generates some 3,000 certificates of birth and death daily.

Now, the system is set to go places: the office of Registrar General of India (RGI) and the Census commissioner plans to replicate the model across the country. At present, Delhi is the only city where citizens can order birth and death certificates online and pay with credit cards. The whole process does not require a single visit to the municipal office.

With nearly 400 private hospitals and nursing homes registered with MCD, Delhi has been recording a 100-per cent birth and death registration for the past two years. In contrast, the national average is 63 per cent for birth and 58 per cent for death registrations.

“The system is convenient for the civic body,” says deputy RGI Harbinder Singh, who recently made MCD work on a possible system to implement the model across the country. Going online means everything moves faster for the agency, as also for the citizens, who “do not have to run between hospitals and the civic body with a piece of paper, trying to get a registration done”.

Dr R C Patnaik, head of MCD’s Health Intelligence Bureau who had initiated the project, says each hospital has been given a user name and password. “Once a birth or death occurs, the hospital informs us by logging into the MCD website.” Any citizen who needs a certificate then can either go to the Citizen Service Bureau (CSB) and ask for a printed copy, or order online and pay by credit card.

Base at Townhall, servers across India Patnaik’s proposal, presented to the RGI last month, involves setting up a base centre at MCD’s Townhall office and a server operating back in each state. He proposes MCD first start a pilot project in a neighbouring state before extending the network to all 35 states and Union Territories.

Singh says Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Chhattisgarh have shown keen interest in MCD’s model, and that the department is looking at implementing it first in smaller cities such as Hyderabad, Lucknow and Bhopal before gradually spreading to all districts and villages.

But right now, Patnaik says MCD is looking at connecting 400 maternity homes and dispensaries in Delhi to “track the immunisation schedule”. Busy connecting all six municipal hospitals in Delhi, Patnaik says the online process helps MCD track immunisation schedule of each child registered with it at birth. The project — dubbed Linking Immunisation and Birth Records (LIBRE) — was set up last year with a grant of Rs 6 lakh from UNICEF.