Why are so many Bangladeshi birthdays on Jan 1?

On the first day of every year, Saiful receives more text messages than the other 364 days. He seldom replies to them. A sense of guilt and apathy weighs upon him as he ignores the birthday wishes pouring into his phone. January 1 is his birthday, but he was not born this day. Every official document might list it as so, but Saiful knows better. What makes it worse for him is that he thinks many of his friends have false birthdays on Facebook, and he feels wary about wishing them. Mahmud was born on July 7, but everyone thinks he was born on January 1. He responds wryly to the birthday wishes on his Facebook wall. In a few months, Mahmud will turn 18 and he will have to register for the National ID Card. “I don’t know which date to put on my National ID, my actual date of birth, or the one on paper.” Mahmud is just one student among thousands, who point their fingers toward their schools. “When we were registering for the SSC exams, the teachers made us put down January 1 as our date of birth. Very few of us protested. The teachers said it was to ensure we got to work a full year in public service.” Public service – government jobs are more appropriate in this context – is looked upon as a holy grail by a generation of Bangladeshis. The job security in government employment and the status that comes with it, rivals that of working at a multinational. Pension and other post-employment benefits are considered part and parcel of the entire package. For these reasons, many parents and teachers encourage and proactively alter the birth dates. Very few of the students get a say on the matter. Elders unequivocally know what is best, imposing their will to forge a crucial piece of information that hounds people throughout their lives. Shishir says: “To put up with the charade, I have to celebrate the false date as my birthday. At this rate, I am definitely going to forget when I was actually born.” Dhaka University’s Prof Syed Manzoorul Islam says: “Many parents believe they are doing what is best for their children. They are blind to the fact that it is a crime. “But I hope the government-mandated registration of birth certificates and digital National ID cards will help dispel this illusion. Perhaps, in 20 years or so, we will not have to see anymore false birthdays on documents.” Sabbir, an engineering student at Dhaka University, suffers from a different case of falsified birthday. He was actually born on January 1, but his teachers changed his date of birth to December 31 after his SSC exams. Prof Biswajit Ghosh of Dhaka University offered his take on the debacle. He says people find it easier to calculate a person’s age if their birthday is on January 1. Even on many digital platforms, the default date is January 1, which people often do not change. The actual extent of the false numbers has never been looked into before. Immigration & Passports Assistant Director Md Hafizur Rahman admitted there are quite a large number of applications with January 1 as the date of birth, but they have never been authenticated. “It is incredibly difficult to say how many of these dates are false, but then numbers will fall once birth registration becomes compulsory” said Hafizur.