U.K. Plan to Send Records to India is Criticized

Plans to electronically send records of United Kingdom births, deaths, and marriages to India for indexing are "outrageous", a civil service union says. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said the Office of National Statistics (ONS) was playing "fast and loose" with sensitive information and that hundreds of UK jobs could be lost. Some members of Parliament seem to agree.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) said the move would help people to trace their family histories. It claimed that the project, which would take about three years to complete, would be secure and would lead to a more efficient online service.

However, a British MP Thursday urged the government to cancel the deal to transfer British genealogical data to India as London police launched an investigation into claims of Indian call centre workers selling off banking and credit card details.

Labour MP John McDonnell tabled a motion in the House of Commons, urging the government to drop moves to transfer a database containing details of every birth, marriage, and death in England and Wales since 1837 to an offshore centre in the southern Indian state of Chennai. McDonnell cited concerns about protection of private information in a country that has been shown to have little regard for such issues.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, slammed the move. "Not only is this highly irregular, it is also outrageous that a government will so readily dismiss concerns of parliament in handing over the records of 250 million people to a third party halfway across the globe," he said. "These are important records charting the births, deaths, and marriages of this country's population, which should be maintained securely in the UK public sector by people accountable to us all," said Serwotka.

The records are currently held in Southport, but would be sent to Chennai, India, creating around 1,000 jobs for the Indians. About 250 million records from England and Wales dating back to 1837 would be sent to India to be transcribed and placed into computer databases.

Comments

[Alan Stewart]

It's not the actual records that are to be sent to India. The ONS is going to have them digitized in the UK, and send the resulting database to India to be indexed. Why they need to do that, when the FreeBMD project has been building a computerized index for the last few years, I can't understand. The FreeBMD index is expected to be complete (for historic records - up to about 100 years ago) by 2007, sooner than the Indians will have it done.
What bothers me about the indexing being carried out in Chennai is that the Indians won't be familiar with UK placenames and surnames. We've already seen some peculiarities in the indexes of Ancestry, the LDS and Scotland's People. The ONS are aiming to get the work done on the cheap, rather than going for quality.

[CM]

FreeBMD has not been indexing the historic birth, death, and marriage records. Instead, they have merely been transcribing the nineteenth-century indexes that already exist. As I understand it, the ONS plans call for creating new indexes to the historic records, similar to what Scotland has done at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. The big problem with the existing 19th-century indexes is that in most cases the nineteenth-century index entries do not provide enough information for you to be able to tell whether you have found the correct entry or not. Although the civil registration started in England and Wales in 1837, the death indexes did not start to list the age at death until 1866. So until then, if you had someone with a common name, you had to know almost exactly when and where that person died before you could locate the correct index entry -- and usually you do not know that precise of information, particularly for those whose estates were not probated (and probates were much less frequent in England and Wales in the nineteenth-century than whas the case in the US). Furthermore, the nineteenth-century birth indexes never list information about the parents (it was not until 1911 that any such information, the mother's maiden surname, began to be added). Finally, nineteenth-century marriage record index entries provide no spousal information (that was not added to index entries until 1912).

Hence, new indexes to the civil registration records of England and Wales are very much needed -- FreeBMD's efforts are useful (particularly for identifying correct marriage entries) but are insufficient. It seems to me that the complaints that the public employees union are raising is just a smoke screen to hide their real complaint, that workers in India are willing to do the indexing job for less money than the public employees union members. I really don't see where there are grounds for complaining on the basis of privacy, since the civil registration records in England and Wales are PUBLIC already. Anyone can get a copy of anyone's records (even modern birth records) merely by paying the appropriate fees.

[WPF]

It seems to me that indexing will be a problem, that might back fire- yes we need more information available for England and Wales, but if names are indexed incorrectly and I sometimes have a problem reading BMD certificates, what will we end up with especially if the original indexes are then removed. We need both then at least we will be able to do a double check.

[Alan Stewart]

CM comments that the FreeBMD indexes are merely transcriptions of the 19th century indexes, and that the ONS intends to create new indexes, similar to those at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. The Scotland's People indexes are also only transcriptions, however, rather than new indexes. Lets hope that the ONS does have completely new indexes created.

[Marilyn]

I KNEW that Ancestry had used people whose first language was not English to do their indexing. It shows! In 1850 a huge number of the people born in Indiana are listed as born in Iowa because the common abbreviation was Ia. I also found that all of Puerto Rico was indexed as Black because once these people learned w, b, & m, they used them on the Spanish language census also, where b meant Blanco. Don't know if this is fixed yet--I certainly pointed it out many times.

[Dave G]

This just seems to be another example of one country outsourcing jobs to get them done cheaply. I wonder where they ever came up with the idea? It is happening more and more, and I am not sure there is a way to stop it. In this particular case though, I have to question the sanity of sending records to be indexed to a country that English is not the first language?

[Lewis McCann]

Why don’t the ONS increase the charge for a certificate to cover the cost of doing the transcribing in the UK?

For those registered on the ONS web site they could give a partial reduction if you agreed to transcribe the details of any certificates you ordered.
The ONS would need to setup a web page whereby on receipt of the certificate you enter the details yourself. Access to the web page would be by a code given to you with the copy certificates.

If the quality of the transcriptions of the 1901 anything to go by, then please get the job done in the UK, and charge us increased cost. Otherwise we will have to live with faulty data for ever, and hence fictitious ancestors appearing on Worldconnect etc because the source documents have not been checked. Garbage in, garbage out!!

[Dino (all Dino, All the Time)]

Lewis,

You mean to tell me that people actually do research before posting to WorldConnect? I thought that WorldConnect was a cust-and-paste fantasyland, I guess I'd better have another look.