NESHWIN ALMEIDA
neshwin@herald-goa.com
It’s 3pm and Margao is known to be a sleepy town at that time of the day. We head to the Salcete Sub-Registrar’s Office to take some feedback from the Sub-Registrar Chandrakant Pissurlekar. He disagrees with our January 22nd story on the Citizen Herald page on how Margao citizens are harassed for birth and marriage records and how his office has a backlog on its performance, while touts and agents are all over charging a fee to issue certificates.
Pissurlekar has issued clarifications on Marathi dailies and wants us to also carry a version of his own on how he’s grappling but trying hard to raise the bar of his inefficient office.
We realize the Sub-Registrar’s office located in the Matanhy Saldanha Complex in room No 219 on the second floor is chaotic and abuzz with over 200 people in a queue yelling at the clerk who has failed to issue birth certificates of applications since November 11, 2015. Inside the archive room where nobody is allowed are more agitated people yelling at some staffers. Outside in the corridor, in the far left corner is a support staff from the same office calling people who failed to get their certificates. He’s in deep conversation with them, taking details of their receipts and promising them immediate certificates and copy of the teor or register book but he does it at a price. An employee from the same office turned tout or agent.
“There is a huge backlog in the issue of certificates. Sadly it’s not my department but I am in charge of inadequacy in that office. The archives present here and issued in certificates to people is actually a property of the Planning and Statistics, but due to lack of space they run from the Sub-Registrar’s office with me overlooking their work and listening to complaints that are raised against the Sub registrar’s office, so I have to take blame. And it’s a known fact that the rush for old birth certificates of mostly two or three generations back is because of the Portuguese passport applications,” explains Pissurlekar.
Merciana Fernandes, a lady in the queue is in tears as she shows us her application of November and how the Sub-Registrar’s office is making her run helter skelter.
“I applied for the birth certificate of my grandfather, born in 1906. I have come thrice to this complex and I am told to keep coming in 15 days and now two months hence, I am told that records from 1904 to 1914 are destroyed and I cannot get the certificate. Does it take 60 days and 4 trips for the clerk to tell me that? Isn’t this harassment of the general public?” questions Merciana.
Like Merciana, there are 200 others in the queue, pleading, begging, producing old records asking for copies, asking for a teor or a certificate before 1948.
“It’s my eighth visit here. I keep returning from the gulf for a certificate of my grandmother that I need to complete a succession deed of our ancestral property. I am given various excuses why the certificate cannot be located and now they say only the Archives Department in Panjim has it. Couldn’t I be told this earlier? I would have saved myself these multiple visits?” asks an angry Jacinta Viegas, who with a few others makes a ruckus, standing in the line and is agitated with the attitude of this office.
