What is Prime Minister Modi’s special project DIGILocker and how will it work?

Have you ever thought how many government documents you have? Generally, Aadhar card, driving license, voter card and PAN card are kept in the wallet and passport is kept at home. Apart from this, income tax return papers, property tax receipts and school and college educational certificates, all these documents are kept in a safe place so that they can be easily found at the time of need.

If we look at it, the number of such documents is very high and it is not easy to manage them, perhaps the government also realises this. While starting the Digital India week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially launched the digital locker service DIGILocker on Wednesday, although its soft launch has already been done.

What is DigiLocker? It is a website where you can store all your government documents. For this you will need your Aadhaar card (number). Although it has not been officially said, but we see this as an attempt to bring all government documents under the protection of Aadhaar card. As a result, having an Aadhaar card will become even more important in the coming times.

To register on the website, you will have to enter your Aadhaar number. After this, an SMS will be sent to your registered mobile, then you will be able to access the DIGILocker website for the first time only after entering the one-time password. However, you can create a new password immediately or link DIGILocker to your Google or Facebook login.

After signing up, you can upload all your government documents to DIGILocker. Currently, this locker has 10MB of storage, but you can save Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of government documents using DIGILocker.

Its purpose is to get rid of the need to carry every document with you. If your birth certificate and education certificate are available online and you apply for a passport, then the passport office can ask for more information about you from DIGILocker using your Aadhaar number. The advantage will be that you will not need to carry the document file while submitting the application.

In the coming time, it may also happen that the RTO sends your driving license directly to your DIGILocker with the help of Aadhar card. In such a situation, if you have to send your license to any agency for verification, then you will always have a certified online version available.

DIGILocker also has an e-signature feature. However, it will be launched later. By providing digital signatures and storing government documents online, the government wants to encourage people to avail government services through the internet.

Today, to complete any government work, you need an identity card and for this it is also necessary to go to the government office. There is hardly any government department that allows you to mail a copy of your document, although doing so seems logical from the security point of view. But DIGILocker will store your document with authenticity and it will also be easy to share it with other departments.

Now many questions are being raised about the security of personal information. Although the right step has been taken by using HTTPS in the main parts of the DIGILocker website (using this protocol, the bank creates secure communication between your computer and its server). The question is how secure is its backend. For one thing, you can be assured that this online storage hub will always be under the evil eye of hackers from India and abroad.

At present, there are not many benefits of DIGILocker. However, this project definitely points towards the direction in which we are moving. Some people fear that having so much data in one place increases the risk of misuse and believe that a small mistake in a single document can cause a bigger problem than before. But we cannot deny the fact that being able to store all the important documents in one place on the Internet and being able to share them easily at the time of need will bring relief to us.

To access the digital locker, visit the DIGILocker website. You can sign up for free using your Aadhaar card details.