Universal Birth Registration – Mapping Every Child
A co-production by Apnalaya and Plan International, this short film looks at the obstacles to birth registration in the slums of Mumbai. The objective of the Universal Birth Registration project is “to ensure the universal birth registration of children born in India and issuance of official birth certificates to children living in difficult circumstances”.
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[...] Universal Birth Registration (Mapping Every Child), a film co-produced by Apnalaya and Plan International, shows some of the obstacles poor and illiterate parents in Mumbai face in trying to get their children’s birth registered. There are some obvious villains, corrupt attorneys and the like, but even more important is a bureaucracy unable to imagine that a small filing fee or filling out paperwork could put birth registration out of the reach of poor families. Imaginative solutions are required here, to make sure that children born at home in slums rather than in hospitals are equally welcomed into the national family. The terrible vulnerability of the illiterate throughout life is a theme in the next set of offerings as well. Len Morris has a blog, The First Grader – Education For All about the film The First Grader, a theatrical film based on the true story of Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge, who when the Kenyan government instituted universal primary education, decided to come to school at the age of eighty-eight. He wanted to read the Bible for himself and not be dependent on others to tell him what it said. [...]