By Narayan Prasad Mishra
We have a system of making a horoscope. When a baby is born, most of us in our country record the date and time of the birth and give it to the astrologer. The astrologer makes the baby’s horoscope, putting all the information about the forecast of a person’s future character and conducts based on the stars and planets at the time of the baby’s birth. The date of birth is unmistakably written on the horoscope. From this point, one should not have a problem writing the correct birth date in the official paper.
Still, we hear and find people’s birth dates recorded in the document are incorrect. This happens because of several reasons. In the 1950’s the government officials’ retirement age was 60. Even then, people used to record their age as one or two years less than the actual date of birth to have some more working period in the future. After some time, the system was introduced to give A.D. and B.S. dates in the country when the students filled up the forms for S. L. C (School Leaving Certificate) examination. It was not easy to give the correct dates of the A.D. unless someone had contact with an astrologer. This was during the era when the calendar with English (A.D.) and Nepali (B. S.) dates was not easily available. Because of that, the students used to give some dates brought out by their school friends and consulted an astrologer who supposedly had B.S. and A.D. dates. More often, when you select the A.D. date this way, that would be different from your actual date of birth.
The other purpose for writing a wrong birth date in our country is the compulsion of being poor and the necessity of a job before reaching the required age. In that case, people increase their age, such as 13 or 14 years old, making them 16 years old on paper so they can get a job earlier. Our society accepted this system as an open secret. In the same way, I also knew the case of making over the age of a person of 13 who recorded their age as 16 to appear at the SLC (School Leaving Certificate) examination when the government made the age rule of 16 for that purpose. The person realized his mistake in his old age when he had to retire three years before his actual age. Another instance is when a wrong date is written someone truly doesn’t know the actual date in the absence of a horoscope, and people write the date just by guessing, depending on their memory. Many were born at home, and not everyone had horoscopes made after birth. It was also not customary to have birth certificates given by the hospital even when children were born in the hospital. Because of all these reasons and likely many other reasons, I am unaware of, and because of this ongoing tradition and system of casually selecting a date of birth, people do not feel bad about writing the wrong date of birth. But in all above mentioned cases, once a date of birth was selected, people wrote the same date throughout their lives. In general, the official date of birth, correct or incorrect, was done by parents and young adult boys and girls who were unconcerned about getting it right at their young age. Whatever the reason for the wrong date, it is still false information.
These days from time to time, we hear about judicial cases of irregularities in writing the birth date in our country. The most known case in this regard was the fake date of birth recorded by Gopal Parajuli, then chief justice of Nepal. He was fired after the country’s judicial council secretariat, a constitutional body, found that he had faked his date of birth to remain in office in 2018. He was charged with even changing his birth date many times.
These days we often hear about changing the birth date for personal benefit. Not only birth date, we sometimes hear people getting a new citizenship certificate and changing their birth date to get a new passport for going abroad as they were not privileged to go with an old passport for some reason — less age and over age bar, deportation, etc. Similarly, we hear about changing the birth date to make someone older get the elderly allowance early. Those irregularities can easily be stopped if we have good governance and righteous administration. The government should study how people can participate in these irregularities and find where there is loose administration, corruption, or negligence.
There is no doubt that the system of elderly allowance is a good gesture for economically poor people. But there are some discrepancies which should be corrected. Making someone older in the paper for giving the elderly allowance to a younger person is undoubtedly a crime. In our society, everyone puts their hands forward when they can get some advantage from the state treasury. As a result, I know even the rich older people and the retired pensioned people who do not qualify for this allowance have been receiving the elderly allowance in the country that should not be. I remember when someone in my ward office, without hesitation, asked me to get the elderly allowance even though I get a pension, telling me that all people of my status with a pension were getting the privilege even when they were not supposed to get it. I politely declined to do this.
Similarly, after the big earthquake of 2015, I remember a retired high court judge who had two houses that received the facilities and cash given to the earthquake victims, supposed to be received only by those who became homeless due to the earthquake. It was suggested to me to apply for earthquake benefits as well. That, too, I denied as I had a place to live though one of two of my houses became unlivable. Corrupt officials are the root cause of any office irregularities and wrongdoings. Good governance is the only solution to solve it. So we must work for good governance to achieve good conduct.
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