Over the past few years, the Government of Nepal has adopted new civil registration laws to regulate the registration of vital life events, such as birth, marriage, divorce, migration, and death. With support from a World Bank project, and with reference to the new laws, the government has developed new digital infrastructure and support teams to implement the laws. This paper traces the translation of the new laws into administrative practices at the local level and suggests that this is an iterative process.
This process of translating, as this paper will demonstrate, at times necessitates extra clarification, instruction, and guidance which are not clearly laid out in the drafting and intent of the original laws. I focus on a specific type of bureaucratic documents known as “paripatra” or “circular” to explore how such extra instructions are conveyed by the federal government to local government civil servants. I pay particular attention to the documents where the federal government instructs the registration of birth for children born to single mothers (ekala mahila bata janmeko bacca). I will then discuss how the difficulty in civil registration for children of single mother reflects the entanglement between kinship and patrilineal-based property inheritance norms. The necessity for further instruction in issuing birth certificate, I suggest, lies in the tensions between the mundanely defined bureaucratic action of registering the birth of a child and the deeply political nature of recognizing one’s fatherhood in the context of Nepal.