Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Md. Asaduzzaman said the marriage and divorce registration system is being digitalized to curb child marriage, polygamy and marriage-related fraud. He made the remarks Wednesday while responding to reporters’ questions at the Law Ministry’s conference room in the Secretariat.
A memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed the same day between the Law and Justice Division and BRAC for implementing a project titled “Civil Registration and Vital Statistics: ICT Infrastructure Development for Marriage and Divorce Registration.”
The law minister said that once this system is integrated with other servers, any individual’s marriage-related information will be accessible with a single click. He added that this data would also be particularly helpful in international visa application processes.
Noting that digitalization would stop many irregularities, he said, “This will make it possible to prevent child marriage and polygamy, as well as marriage-related fraud.
Once the data system is linked with various servers, the necessary information about any individual will be easily available. Child marriage will be prevented, polygamy will be prevented, plus fraud will be prevented. When applying for an international visa, all the information will be available there too, with a single click.”
Under the project, a pilot program will initially be carried out in 10 upazilas. The minister also said the project would cost about 8 crore taka.
Responding to a question about the agreement with BRAC, the minister said BRAC was not brought in because of any weakness on the government’s part. Rather, he said, the government is drawing on BRAC’s long-standing field-level experience with marriage-related issues.
Md. Asaduzzaman said, “BRAC has been working since its inception. For the past 55 years, BRAC has worked on women’s marital status issues down to the grassroots level across nearly all of Bangladesh.
They have experience in this. We will take a training program from them for our marriage registrars (kazis). This is not a matter of government weakness. We are simply drawing on their expertise.”