The civil registration (CR) system in Thailand is the main source of vital statistics of
the country. It was first developed in 1909 under a legal act which mandated a formal listing
of the population throughout the kingdom. This law also led to the first population census in
1910. The first birth, death, and a cross-sub-district migration registration law was enacted in
1917. Subsequently, during 1917 to 1947, the government issued five ministerial regulations
and four acts related to civil registration and population census, respectively. However, the
enforcement of these decrees was not uniform. Thus, a new, comprehensive law (the ‘Civil
Registration Act B.E. 2499’) was enacted in 1956 and applied throughout the country, while
the former laws were abrogated. In this act, a district or local registrar had to preserve house
registration documents of all domiciles in their area of jurisdiction at a registry office and
maintain up-to-date information on births, deaths, and in- out-migration. To improve the CR
system, many measures for facilitating vital events registration were offered. Among these, the
change from a hand-written or paper-based to a computer-based system, known as ‘the
Population Identification Number Project’, was the most important. This transition took six
years from 1982 to 1988 to complete the transfer of information from all house registration
documents (approximately 12 million households covering 48 million population) to a
mainframe computer. A unique 11-digit number was assigned to each domicile, and a unique
13-digit number was assigned to be a personal identification number for each Thai citizen. To
accommodate these and other CR system changes, the Civil Registration Act B.E. of 2499
(1956) was replaced by the ‘Civil Registration Act B.E. 2534’ (1991). This law is still in use
today, even though there were some minor revisions in 2008. The agency responsible for the
CR system of Thailand is the Bureau of Registration and Administration (BORA), Department
of Local Administration, Ministry of Interior (MOI).