India, June 10 -- The Maharashtra government has directed the BMC to cancel 19,734 birth certificate changes that were allegedly carried out illegally under the guise of "corrections" or "spelling corrections".

In a communication on Tuesday, the government stated that the corrections made in these birth records were not in accordance with the provisions of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, and Rule 11 of the Maharashtra Registration of Births and Deaths Rules, 2000. The BMC has been instructed to revoke the corrected entries after individually verifying each document related to each correction. The original birth records are to be retained in their original form.

The directive, sanctioned by the municipal commissioner, co...