MANILA, Philippines--The Quezon City government has simplified its birth registration system, including the waiving of fees, to facilitate the process and ensure that all births in the city are properly recorded.
Mayor Feliciano Belmonte told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net) in an interview that the city government has removed the bureaucratic processes that used to delay registration of child births in Quezon City.
"We try to be proactive in this matter so we waived all the fees and other bureaucratic requirements," said Belmonte.
Under "Operation: Birthright Project," unregistered Quezon City-born children may now be registered without payment of the P180 regulatory fee, which was mandated before under the city’s revenue code, or presentation of certain documents, Belmonte said.
While the simplified birth registration applies to all Quezon City residents, Belmonte said it is mostly indigent families who fail to register the births of their children.
The mayor said he has ordered the clustering of barangay (neighborhoods), and tasked barangay leaders to facilitate birth registration in their jurisdictions.
The city government has allocated P1.5 million to the civil registry office for Operation Birthright.
With the fees waived, there will be no more need for indigent families to apply for free birth registration.
Previously, exemption from payment of the birth registration fees was allowed for parents whose gross annual income was below P60,000 but they were required to submit barangay clearances and certificates of indigency from the city’s Social Services and Development Department.
Belmonte said it was not the fees but the tedious procedure that discouraged residents from registering the births of their children.
"I don’t believe that the fees are the main consideration, it is the bureaucratic system that has hindered people from registering," said Belmonte.
Quezon City data show that about seven to eight percent of the city’s population of 2.2 million are still unregistered.
