In Kaagaz, Pankaj Tripathi plays a man who discovers something absurd: he is alive, but government records say he is dead.
The film is based on Lal Bihari, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh declared dead in official records in 1976, who spent 18 years proving that he was alive.
The story is extreme, but the problem behind it is not.
For the state, a person exists through records. Births and deaths must be registered, and access to inheritance, identity documents, entitlements and public services often depends on those records being correct.
India has made remarkable progress here. In 2024, 99.1% of estimated births and 99.4% of estimated deaths were registered.
As registration approaches universality, the challenge shifts from coverage to reliability: are records accurate, updated and reflected across government databases?
Can India now move from near-universal registration to a civil registration system it can truly trust? And can these records become infrastructure for better governance?
These are the questions we explore in today’s Policy Mandala.
To understand these questions, we first need to understand what this system of records actually is.
India’s Civil Registration System (CRS) is the official system for recording births and deaths. Registrations are carried out by designated authorities across states and local bodies, while the Registrar General of India compiles the data nationally. This also creates the legal basis for birth and death certificates.
But, how accurate is that count?
While a 99% registration rate may sound complete, it does not tell the whole story. An event can still be missed, registered late, or recorded incorrectly. Several states in India recorded 50% or less birth registration within 21 days, showing how national averages can hide gaps.
The gaps become visible when we look deeper. In 2024, 84.2% of registered infant deaths occurred in urban areas and just 15.8% in rural areas. Part of this may reflect rural patients reaching urban hospitals, but the imbalance also raises concerns about weaker registration of infant deaths in rural areas.
So, near-universal registration can coexist with significant blind spots within particular regions, populations and types of events.
And the root of this problem lies in the way the system is structured.
India’s CRS is highly decentralised, with registrations spread across local bodies, Panchayats, health institutions and state systems. This creates uneven standards, weak interoperability and inconsistent data quality. Limited staff, digital capacity and public awareness add to the problem, making the reliability of the national system dependent on thousands of local registration points.
India has standardised its database faster than it has standardised the thousands of local points that produce the data.
The problem is challenging, but there is also a powerful reason to solve it.
Imagine what could happen if a birth or death were not merely recorded, but treated as an administrative event.
When someone dies, the death certificate is often only the beginning. Families must still approach banks, insurers, pension authorities and government departments separately, repeating information the state may already possess.
The consequences of fragmented records can accumulate. As of January 2026, public-sector banks alone had transferred ₹60,518 crore in unclaimed deposits to the RBI’s Depositor Education and Awareness Fund. Another ₹8,974 crore remained unclaimed with insurers. These amounts are certainly not all attributable to deaths, but they illustrate the scale of assets that can become disconnected from their rightful claimants.
Birth creates a similar opportunity in the opposite direction. A registered birth could trigger information about eligible maternal and child benefits, health services or future documentation requirements rather than leaving families to discover each scheme separately.
This is where CRS can become more than a registry. A birth or death could become a trusted trigger through which relevant government systems update themselves.
India has already taken an important step in this direction. The Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023 already moves in this direction by creating a national database and enabling CRS data to be shared with systems such as Aadhaar, electoral rolls, ration cards, passports and property records.
The next step should be to move from information sharing on request to carefully designed event-driven administration.
A registered death, for example, could automatically notify relevant public databases that a status change has occurred. Banks, insurers and pension systems could receive a verified death notification under an appropriate legal framework and initiate the next workflow, rather than requiring the family to repeatedly prove the same event.
Importantly, notification should not automatically close accounts, transfer assets or determine heirs. Those decisions require their own legal safeguards and verification.
But such integration will work only if the record at the centre of it can be trusted.
First, CRS needs stronger national institutional ownership. A specialised CRVS mission within the Registrar General of India could set standards, audit data quality and oversee integration across systems.
Second, interoperability must be built through common data definitions, identifiers, APIs and correction protocols so that the same event is interpreted consistently across databases.
Third, local registration capacity must improve. Better software cannot compensate for unreported events, incorrect entries or understaffed local offices.
Finally, integration requires safeguards. Citizens should know which databases have been updated, when and why, with clear mechanisms to correct errors and challenge incorrect actions. Access must be purpose-specific and auditable rather than allowing unrestricted movement of personal data.
Singapore offers a useful illustration of the broader principle. Once a doctor certifies a death electronically, it is automatically registered and the deceased person’s national identity record is invalidated without requiring the family to visit another registration counter. Its digital birth system also connects registration with services such as child benefits.
The lesson is not that India should replicate another country’s system. It is that citizens should not have to carry information from one arm of the state to another when the state already possesses a verified record.
That would mark the real transition from a Civil Registration System to civil registration as governance infrastructure and ensure that people like Lal Bihari or their families do not end up running pillar to post to prove their existence.
Co-Authored by Avdhesh Pathak & Samridh Joshi
