Delayed birth and death registrations face a magistrate from 1 October

The Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2026, will come into force on 1 October. Registrar General of India Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan signed the gazette notice under section 1(2) of the Act, which is numbered 12 of 2026. Parliament passed the bill in both Houses. The President assented in August.

The change sits in section 13 of the 1969 Act, last rewritten in 2023. The government's stated aim is to make late registration harder so that births and deaths are reported on time. The machinery that records those events is the civil registration system run by states under a central statute. Certificates from that system now feed Aadhaar, school admission, passports and inheritance. A looser late window has been treated as a back door.

Two clocks, two benches

If information reaches the registrar after one year but within two years of the birth or death, registration still needs an order from a District Magistrate, a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, or an executive magistrate authorised by the DM for that area. The magistrate must check that the event occurred and a prescribed fee must be paid. The Act defines executive magistrate by reference to section 14 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023.

If the information arrives more than two years after the event, the order can come only from a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class who has jurisdiction where the birth or death took place. That magistrate also has to verify the facts. A fee still applies. Until now, delays of more than one year all sat with the executive magistracy. The amendment splits the queue and moves the older files onto a judicial desk.

Nityanand Rai, Minister of State for Home Affairs, had introduced the bill in the Lok Sabha on 29 July. The House passed it on 31 July. Rajya Sabha passed it on 4 August. The Cabinet had cleared the draft on 20 July. PRS Legislative Research summarised the shift as a move from executive to judicial control for the longest delays.

What families will feel

A parent who registers a child at six months is outside this amendment. A family that discovers an unregistered death three years later is inside it, and will need a first-class judicial magistrate rather than a tehsildar's order. In districts where JMFC boards are already full, that is a longer wait. In districts where late registration has been used to manufacture identities, it is a higher bar.

The 1969 Act already required an order after one year. The complaint against that rule was that executive magistrates issued them as a matter of course. Putting two-year-plus cases in a criminal-court magistrate's list is meant to change the default. Whether it does depends on how those courts treat verification. A rubber stamp in a different building is not a reform.

States will have to tell registrars, DMs and JMFC courts that the new split applies from 1 October. Software used by municipal registrars will need a field for the type of order. Families who have been sitting on unregistered events from 2023 and 2024 now have two weeks to decide whether to file under the old one-year-plus executive route before the judicial gate closes on anything older than two years.

The Registrar General's notice is short. The effect is not. Civil registration is how the state first sees a person and last records them. Tightening the late door is a bet that more events will be reported in the legal window, and that the ones that are not will face a judge.