Digital India Initiative Gathers Steam, Govt Launches Beta Version of ‘Digital Locker’

Taking forward the Digital India campaign undertaken by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government, the department of electronics and information technology (DeiTY), has launched a beta version of the ‘digital locker’. This new service is aimed at minimizing the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies.

“The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online,” said the government in a press release.

This will also allow citizens to upload their own electronic documents and digitally sign them using the e-sign facility. These digitally signed documents can be shared with Government organizations or other entities.

The locker would serve as an all-encompassing cabinet for store-housing medical, educational, passport, PAN card details of every Indian in digital format.

As per the website, Digital locker will allow secure uploading and sharing of documents anytime, anywhere to authorised users/agencies. The issuer departments will also be able to automatically push the link of the document kept in the repositories.

How to access digital locker

In order to access the digital locker, you need to have Aadhaar card. It is necessary that your mobile number is linked to your Aadhaar number in the UIDAI system. One just needs to enter Aadhaar number on the login field, a One Time Password (OTP) will be sent on to the UIDAI registered mobile number. Then you need to enter that OTP in the field and an e-Know Your Customer (e-KYC) will be done by UIDAI.

Once the e-KYC is successfully done, you can view the URIs of e-Documents which have been uploaded into the Digital Locker by various issuers. One can also upload e-documents in their Digital Locker and eSign them. Further, the citizens can share private documents with requesters by sharing a link to the e-Document to the email address of the requester.

Once registered, user will get a dedicated 10MB free personal storage space, linked to each resident’s Aadhaar. Going forward, the government will also be launching its mobile app.

The Digital Locker system has the following objectives

• Enable digital empowerment of residents by providing them with Digital Locker on the cloud
• Enable e-Signing of documents and make them available electronically and online minimize the use of physical documents
• Ensure authenticity of the e-documents and thereby eliminate usage of fake documents  Secure access to Govt. issued documents through a web portal and mobile application for residents
• Reduce administrative overhead of Govt. departments and agencies and make it easy for the residents to receive services
• Anytime, anywhere access to the documents by the resident  Open and interoperable standards based architecture
• Architecture to support a well-structured standard document format to support easy sharing of documents across departments and agencies
• Ensure privacy and authorized access to residents’ data.

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