Awareness about birth registration in a resettlement colony of Delhi

Abstract

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is more than a decade old, but even today more than a third of all children are denied the right to an identity. Birth registration is the first legal document in which the name of the child gets entered along with the name of the parents. Globally, every year about 40 million children are born without being registered. Six out of ten unregistered newborns are in South and South-east Asia.(1) The registration of births and deaths in India was made compulsory under the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969. However, the current level of birth registration in India is 63.8% as per the latest 2005 provisional national estimates, which means that out of the estimated 26 million births taking place each year, approximately 9.4 million children (36.2%) go unregistered every year.(2) Taking these facts into consideration, this study was planned to assess the awareness about birth registration in an urban slum of Delhi.