After Digital Locker trial version was launched in Feb, 2015 over 1,00,000 Digital Lockers have been opened by the Citizens, within 100 days of its launch representing the trust, benefit and convenience offered by the Digital Locker to a common man. 

Digital Locker is one of the key initiatives under the Digital India vision, which is aimed at eliminating the usage of physical documents. Digital Locker will allow various agencies to push the documents into the Digital Locker of citizens mapped to their Aadhaar Number. It also allows citizens to upload their own electronic documents with or without digitally signing them using the e-sign facility allowing them to store all such documents for posterity. The Digital Locker system has the following advantages:

a)      Print anytime from anywhere – All electronic documents will be in a printable, enabling user to print from anywhere. Also, incase of disasters, non availability of documents, it is easily accessible by user even when the documents are lost

b)      Convenience – No more long queues or procedures to get the documents.

c)      Free of cost – Digital Locker facility is provided to Indian Citizen free of charge and will enable its use by lower strata of society.

d)      Shareable – residents can easily share the documents with other agencies/departments without having to share photocopies, scan copies, document uploads, etc. Sharing can easily be done even on feature phones even via SMS and text based systems.

e)       Verifiable  – most  importantly,  government  documents  and  certificates  issued can be verified online, eliminating  the  use  of fake  documents/certificates.

f)       Secure - Only the owner has the right to see and share the documents as per their own requirement and convenience.

Few other benefits envisaged by users are

a)      A number of individual certificates such as Birth, Domicile, etc., may be applied online to speed up the process. The user agencies will be authorised to access the documents by the owner of digital locker. Also, the local bodies issuing these documents can push these certificates in digital form directly in the Digital Locker eliminating the risk of fake document. This will greatly benefit the people who find it difficult to have proper storage space for physical documents. This would be safe during the National Disaster such as floods, cyclones, fire etc.

b)      Hassel free registration of

a.       Sim Card

b.      LPG connection

c.       Driving License

In effect Digital Locker will touch every Citizen life by bringing in lot of convenience and therefore fulfilling the government vision of citizen centric governance model of providing services at the door step of citizens.

In India, most of the government documents used for various purposes are in physical form. This inter alia means that every time a citizen needs to avail  any  service,  a self attested  photo  copy  either  in  physical  or  scanned  form  is  shared.  Use of physical copies of document creates huge overheads in terms of manual verification, paper storage, manual audits etc. and thereby incurring cost and inconvenience for all the stakeholders.  This also creates problem for various agencies to verify the authenticity of these documents, thus, creating loopholes in the eco system leading to usage of fake documents/certificates by certain unscrupulous elements. The Digital Locker is going to address these concerns.

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KSP/SS