From Birth to Death, All in One Place

It’s about time we consider an increased improvement in the usage of technology in every-day lives of our people, at least to an extent close to what the developed countries are utilizing now. It is much believed that most of the bottlenecks that lie around the offices, especially the government ones, in Sri Lanka could be eliminated by the proper use of technology and a working culture adapted to embrace it. Though it is evident that to a certain extent the government offices utilize the luxuries of computer usage and the benefits of a properly managed information system, the majority of them are still under-utilizing these new prospects the evolving technology can offer.

The recent decision by the Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs to computerize the birth certificate generation process seems to be a positive start at increasing this number. So much has been said and written about this, so the aim of this post is not to reiterate on the same thing, but to deviate the attention to something bigger than this.

Professor V.K.Samaranayake, the head of the ICTA and an eminent forerunner in the IT upbringing of Sri Lanka, has been promoting this idea of having a nation-wide, single database to keep track of the data of the whole population of this country for quite some time now. His idea was to use this database in all the data needs of an individual and all the government agencies that act upon peoples’ data can use this database to fulfill their information needs. So the basic idea is to open a record when a person is born, update that record each time a significant event takes place in his/her life and delete that record when that person dies and in each situation, the necessary paperwork will be generated from the data gathered from this database.

The idea looks fascinating to me. Obviously, many will come-up with the pitfalls, the practical inefficiencies and will question the feasibility of implementing a structure of this magnitude but I still see this as a feasible prospect to lift our country right up there with the best. Provided that the ideal people take on such a project, it wouldn’t be illogical to think that we can mitigate the negative issues and get this running sometime in the future.

My enthusiasm in this comes with all the positive aspects I see in the event of this system implementing. First of all, the cost reduction that can be achieved with regard to the inconsistencies in the government offices could be immense. This with the reduction of paper work circulating in the offices alone could outweigh any obstacles that could arise as a consequence of implementing such a system. This would mean that all the important documents pertaining to an individual - the birth certificate, the marriage certificate, voting papers etc. can be generated from the same database accessed by different departments. The reduction in delays in the government office work we experience today, the inconsistencies we experience in elections and most of such loop holes in the current system would be avoided.

So, to me, all the more signs say this could be a real prospect in the future of Sri Lanka. Have your say.