Bi-lingual birth certificates, one-day service for land deeds from Mar 16 : Minister Vajira Abeywardena

A one-day service to obtain land deeds and the issuance of a bi-lingual birth certificate would be implemented from March 16 onwards, Minister of Provincial Councils & Local Government, Vajira Abeywardena said.

Accordingly, children born after January 01, 2019 will receive a birth certificate in Tamil and Sinhala along with an identification number that would be used as the National Identity Card (NIC) number of the person in future.

A new feature of these birth certificate will be the omission of information as to whether the parent's of the child were married or not.

The latest birth certificate will also come with a watermarked national emblem, a machine-readable code and a security seal in order to prevent the forging of such documents.

This initiative would be implemented island-wide, the Minister Abeywardena said. He noted that the government earns an annual revenue of Rs 800 million through the service of providing land deeds.

However, the government is expected to generate an annual income of Rs 8 billion with the implementation of the one-day system, Minister Abeywardena noted while adding that these documents could be obtained from the Registrar General's Department.

The format of the new birth certificates