DigiLocker: India’s App That Help People Digitise & Store Documents Crosses 100 Mn Users

DigiLocker has hit the mark of 101 Mn users today on 19 March. The app helps people to digitise and store digital copies of 560 documents including Aadhaar card, insurance policy, income certificate and driving licence.  

The app was designed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) under its digital India initiative. In a bid to promote paperless governance, MeiTY created the app in 2015. 

As per its website, DigiLocker aims at ‘digital empowerment’ of the citizen by providing access to authentic digital documents to the citizen’s digital document wallet.

The app utilises application programming interfaces (APIs) to retrieve, digitise and retain documents. It has been recognised by several government agencies, fintech companies and nearly all insurance companies. It offers 1GB storage to every user.

In this year, the app has issued 4.94 Bn documents as compared to 4.75 Bn in 2021. It presently has 1783 issuers and 359 requesters on the platform. 

Apart from being helpful to government bodies, DigiLocker has proven to be beneficial for businesses, especially startups. Firstly, the startups need to  integrate with its software and then access government records for various processes such as KYC and monetary transactions, thus eliminating paperwork as well as securing the data.  

In 2021, digital payment app Paytm integrated with DigiLocker through Paytm’s mini-app store bringing convenience to its customers as the customers can easily access all government records at one place.  

In 2020, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) allowed digital wealth management startups to use information stored in DigiLocker for KYC processes. Beforehand, SEBI held discussions with stakeholders and used the feedback to push for ease of investing, which should bring some relief to investors and investment platforms.

Besides this, the statutory body University Grant Commission (UGC) has been using DigiLocker to store marksheets, degrees and other education related information.

Seeing the success of DigiLocker, the National Health Authority has latey rolled out a digital health stack–Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) that operates similarly to the MeiTY-led cloud app. ABHA will help users to register themselves in a healthcare program and also, store their information at one place. It will further allow healthcare partners such as doctors, hospitals, and labs to upload the digital records of a person to the ecosystem, which can then be aggregated to a user’s account.

In the last few years, the Indian government has launched a slew of digital apps–Umang, Aarogya Setu, Bhim, and ePathshala app–to name a few, to keep up with the rising digitalisation.