About DigiLocker DigiLocker is an Indian digitization online | UPSC Notes EPFO Labour Law
About DigiLocker
DigiLocker is an Indian digitization online service provided by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India under its Digital India initiative. DigiLocker provides an account in cloud to every Aadhaar holder to access authentic documents/certificates such as driving license, vehicle registration, academic mark sheet in digital format from the original issuers of these certificates. It also provides 1GB storage space to each account to upload scanned copies of legacy documents.
Users need to possess an Aadhaar number to use DigiLocker. For sign-up, the Aadhaar number and the one-time password sent to the Aadhaar-registered mobile number, need to be entered.
The beta version of the service was rolled out in February 2015, and launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 1 July 2015. The storage space provided was 100 MB initially, and was later increased to 1 GB. The individual file size for upload cannot exceed 10 MB.
There is also an associated facility for e-signing documents. The service is intended to minimise the use of physical documents, reduce administrative expenses, provide authenticity of the e-documents, provide secure access to government-issued documents and to make it easy for the residents to receive services.
➨ Structure of DigiLocker
Each user's digital locker has the following sections.
My Certificates: This section has two subsections:
Digital Documents: This contains the URI's of the documents issued to the user by government departments or other agencies.
Uploaded Documents: This subsection lists all the documents which are uploaded by the user. Each file to be uploaded should not be more than 10MB in size. Only pdf, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp and gif file types can be uploaded.
My Profile: This section displays the complete profile of the user as available in the UIDAI database.
My Issuer: This section displays the issuers' names and the number of documents issued to the user by the issuer.
My Requester: This section displays the requesters' names and the number of documents requested from the user by the requesters.
Directories: This section displays the complete list of registered issuers and requesters along with their URLs.
➨ Amendments to IT Act for Digital Locker
Digital Locker is not merely a technical platform. Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India also notified for Digital Locker. Amendments made to these rules in February 2017 state that the issued documents provided and shared through Digital Locker are at par with the corresponding physical certificates.
According to this Rule, – (1) Issuers may start issuing and Requesters may start accepting digitally (or electronically) signed certificates or documents shared from subscribers’ Digital Locker accounts at par with the physical documents in accordance with the provisions of the Act and rules made thereunder. (2) When such certificate or document mentioned in sub-rule (1) has been issued or pushed in the Digital Locker System by an issuer and subsequently accessed or accepted by a requester through the URI, it shall be deemed to have been shared by the issuer directly in electronic form.
