Digital Certification

December 21, 2006 (LBO) – Sri Lanka has started to digitize the issue of birth, marriage and death certificates, which has cut processing time to as little as ten minutes, officials said. Mooted by the Information Communication Technology Agency or ICTA last year, the project has already digitized around 2.2 million birth certificates belonging to the Colombo District.

"This tech savvy initiative will allow Divisional Secretariats to bring down lengthy waiting times to as little as ten minutes for the issuance of any one of these certificates," D C Dissanayake Programme Manager, ICT said.

So far 250,000 birth certificates out of over 6.7 million registered in the Colombo Divisional Secretariat that fall between 1960 and 2006, have been digitized.

Thimbirigasyaya, Moratuwa, Dehiwala and Ratmalana divisional secretariats have followed suit.

In addition to shorter processing times, officials say automation makes it easier to store and issue documents.

"We have stored all citizens’ birth, marriage and death certificates at the central depository (in Colombo) and it takes a lot of space to store all the physical files," a high ranking official from Colombo Divisional