The Punjab and Haryana High Court has refused to permit the replacement of a minor girl’s biological father’s name with that of her mother’s second husband on her birth certificate, holding that a subsequent remarriage cannot alter the parentage recorded at the time of the child’s birth.

The Court was hearing a petition seeking directions to the concerned authorities to replace the name of Jagjit Singh with Balwinder Kumar as the child’s father in a birth certificate issued on April 25, 2022.

The plea was moved after the child’s mother remarried Balwinder Kumar and sought to have his name recorded as the child’s father in place of her biological father.

Rejecting the request, the High Court relied upon its earlier decision in Pooja Goyal v. Government of Haryana and Others, which dealt with a similar issue.

The Court observed that a birth certificate is a statutory record documenting the fact of a child’s birth and the parentage existing at that time. The subsequent dissolution of the biological parents’ marriage, or the remarriage of either parent, does not by itself alter those recorded facts.

The Court made it clear that changes in the family structure occurring after a child’s birth cannot, merely on that basis, be used to rewrite the parentage reflected in the statutory birth record.

Accordingly, the High Court found no grounds to entertain the plea seeking substitution of the biological father’s name with that of the mother’s second husband and declined to grant the relief sought.

The ruling draws a distinction between the legal record of a child’s birth and subsequent changes in family circumstances, reiterating that remarriage alone cannot change the parentage recorded at the time of birth.