eGovWatch: Centre’s ‘digital locker’ to empower citizens

After Jan Dhan, the Centre now plans to offer a “digital locker” to every Indian. The government hopes the plan will eliminate the need for people to carry hard copies of certificates issued by states, municipal agencies and other bodies and be the next step to empower citizens.

The locker is envisaged as a part of the Digital India initiative of the Narendra Modi government to make maintaining of birth certificates, school and college leaving certificates, residence and marriage proof and even PAN cards, among others, by citizens superfluous.

At any point, an Indian citizen needs to lug around these papers which need to be produced before departments to get a wide range of jobs done such as while making an application for a gas and electricity connection or opening bank accounts.

To verify the authenticity of the papers, the departments insist on several levels of verifications that in turn cost money and time. Since they are the basis on which government services are provided, tampering with them has become a huge industry which leads to leakage of welfare funds. The plan envisaged by the department of information technology is expected to cut the bottom from these leakages. Instead, the records will be stored in a digital format and can be accessed using Aadhaar numbers and another level of authentication. R S Sharma, secretary of IT department, says the plan is at an advanced stage.

“Budget is of course a major constraint. But the more germane problem will be to capture the details of the people riding on the Aadhaar platform,” he said. For this, the government is planning to roll out a national depository that will hold these records. To be successful, the plan has to start uploading the data of the new entrants. The citizens will be offered the option to convert their paper documents to a digital format.

It will not take much time, assured an official involved in the exercise. “The template for all these documents is standard and so operators will only need to fill in the details of the individuals,” he said. To guard against pilferage or illegal modification, the process will involve two keys including the Aadhaar number.

The other key will be generated from a random series and will be known only to the individual concerned. The government hopes the digital locker will free millions of citizens from the trips they often make to retrieve their records. Since the poor are especially vulnerable to lose their records, the locker will be of most use to them and ensure others cannot hoodwink them from of their rights. It will also have the advantage of standardising the scope of such documents across states and the level of access to them by government departments.

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