Kolkata: As New Year dawned, there will be no marriage registration in West Bengal for first four days of Poush, a month in the Indian calendar which is considered inauspicious due to religious reasons and for retrograde planetary constellations in astrological terms. On the surface, the closing of the marriage registration office and the unavailability of an online procedure for registration for weddings may seem related, but the closure of the online system of marriage registration for four days hardly has anything to do with religion and astrology.
In reality, a four-day software upgrade will deny couples to go for online registration making them wait for a few days. The registration process, which was stopped on Tuesday, will be stalled till Friday, an official of the Marriage Registrar General Office in Kolkata said.
The lawyers associated with the marriage registration office have been instructed by the Marriage Registrar General Office not to involve themselves in any registration-related process during these four days.
However, the closure of marriage registration offices for four days in the state is unprecedented. According to sources, about 1,100 applications were submitted for registration during the period. These applications have been postponed for now.
"A further decision will be taken in this regard once the portal becomes operational after maintenance," the official said.
The marriage registration office will issue a new notification after Friday. Bio-metrics has been made mandatory for legal marriages since November last year. According to sources, the problem persists regarding bio-metric fingerprint verification. To solve that problem, portal maintenance work has to be fixed. In the past, the portal remained closed for only a few hours.
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