AHMEDABAD: A determined single mother found herself at odds with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) over the entry of her child’s father’s name on the birth certificate.
Unwilling to comply with her request for a blank entry, the AMC inserted the child’s grandfather’s name instead. Frustrated by this action, the woman took her protest to the Gujarat high court, demanding a rectification that would remove her father’s name from her child’s birth certificate and leave the ‘father’s name’ column vacant.
After hearing the arguments, Justice V D Nanavati directed the AMC registrar to effect the necessary changes as requested by the petitioner in her application.
The petitioner got married in January 2013 and had a daughter. Unfortunately, the marital relationship soured, leading to separation and eventual divorce, with a Gandhinagar court granting the decree in February 2019. In September 2019, she welcomed a baby boy at a private nursing home in Ahmedabad.
Refusing to divulge the biological father’s identity, the petitioner requested that the child’s father’s name be omitted from the birth certificate. However, the AMC’s birth and death registrar’s office insisted on filling the column. To her astonishment, upon receiving the birth certificate four days later, the woman discovered her father’s name in the column she wanted blank.
Despite her efforts to convince the AMC to rectify the situation, including an application submitted to the AMC registrar in January 2022 that went unanswered, the woman’s request fell on deaf ears. Subsequently, she approached the high court, seeking a directive to the AMC for necessary amendments to her child’s birth certificate.
Citing a central government notification prompted by a Supreme Court ruling that supports single mothers’ choice to include their names in their child’s birth certificate and not insist on mentioning the biological father, the woman’s lawyer made a compelling case. In response to the high court’s inquiry, the AMC’s registrar admitted to the error and expressed willingness to make the required corrections, pending the court’s direction. The court directed the AMC registrar to make the changes mentioned in the petitioner’s application.