Civil Status |19 December 2019

Mrs Flore and Mr Gopal speaking to the press yesterday (Photos: Anel Robert)

National Population Data Information System (NPDIS) fully operational

The Civil Status division in the Immigration Department, in collaboration with the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT), has now introduced a new system which will expedite the services it is offering.

The National Population Data Information System (NPDIS) is expected to ease such processes as issuing birth, marriage and death certificates, change of NIN, adoption certificate or change of name certificate.

The Civil Status division has become a one-stop shop for the public. With this new system all the records are available in one place and anyone can immediately access their important documents, after showing their ID.

Noella Flore, principal civil status officer at the Civil Status section and Krisl Gopal, the principal analyst/programmer at DICT met the press yesterday to give more clarifications on the new system.

“It has been two weeks since the staff of Civil Status started entering the names of the population and they are now very familiar with the system. They say that it makes their work easier,” noted Mrs Flore.

An important change in the functioning at the Civil Status office, as from January 2020, is the registration days for newly borns. “In order to make the process go smoothly, newly borns will be registered only on Mondays and Wednesdays. This will prevent the long waiting hours for small babies,” noted Mrs Flore.

Talking about the new system, Mr Gopal said that “the system used before was the AS 400 developed by IBM. The system was getting obsolete and we had to replace it. DICT also started to work on this new system when we realised that they had different systems to store the data as well as the national identity card info was separated from them. Now once information is being added in the system, it will appear everywhere. The database of the system is being stored up at the DICT.”

With the NPDIS system all data will be entered once by the civil status officer and issuing of a national identity card will be more efficient. All people requiring a new certificate is required to bring a form of identification.

Vidya Gappy