Under the Civil Registration System (CRS), it is legally mandatory to register birth and death events within how many days in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 21 days. Under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 — the statute that runs India's Civil Registration System — every birth and every death must be reported to the local registrar within 21 days of its occurrence, and registration within that window is free of charge. (Precisely: section 8(1) of the Act says information shall be given 'within such time as may be prescribed'; the 21-day period and the no-fee rule are set by the rules made under the Act, not by the Act's own text.) The Act then provides a graded set of delayed-registration steps: an event reported after the 21-day window attracts a late fee, an event reported after 30 days and up to a year needs the written permission of the prescribed authority, and an event reported more than a year late can be registered only on the order of a magistrate. The 21-day figure is the one the question asks for, because it is the only period during which registration is a plain right rather than a concession.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Fifteen days is not a period recognised by the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 for reporting a birth or a death. It is a plausible-sounding round number with no statutory basis here.  (c) An arbitrary figure with no place in the Act — it exists in the options only to sit between the two numbers that do matter, 21 and 30.  (d) The most tempting wrong answer, because 30 days does appear in the scheme of the Act — but as the outer edge of late registration, not as the normal reporting period. Between 21 and 30 days an event can still be registered on payment of a late fee; only within 21 days is registration ordinarily due as of right and free.

Concept: The Civil Registration System is India's continuous, compulsory and permanent recording of vital events — every birth and every death, as and when it happens. It rests on the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, and it is administered in a chain: the Registrar General of India coordinates nationally, each State has a Chief Registrar of Births and Deaths, and the actual entries are made by local registrars — a panchayat secretary, a municipal official, or the designated officer of a hospital. This is quite different from the Census, which is a decennial snapshot of the whole population, and from the Sample Registration System, which estimates birth and death rates from a large sample rather than recording every event.

State PCS 2019 Q33 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q33 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer