Modi's Digital Locker Frees You From Government Paperwork

Aren't you tired of carrying around, worrying about, and often fighting with government offices to process your life's most important paperwork - your birth certificate and university degrees and more? A lot of us keep soft copies of these as PDF files stored in our emails, we haven't had a real online backup - until now.

Now, with the Government's 'Digital Locker', you can keep all your documents online, and access them using their Aadhaar numbers.

To create an account, you can use your Aadhaar card, or unique identification (UID), number. The Aadhaar number, which must be mapped to their mobile phone number and email address in the Aadhaar database. "Mobile as a digital identity was an idea articulated in Digital India programme," said RS Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and information technology, or DeitY. The program aims to put every Indian's educational, medical, passport and PAN card details online.

The system is hosted on the National Informatics Centre's cloud, and will work in tandem with digital repositories of the departments issuing citizen documents. In the initial phase, 1 million digital lockers will be made available, with 10 MB of storage space per person. This will eventually be scaled up to 1 GB per locker.

What is even more awesome is that you can self-attest these electronic documents via an Aadhaar-linked digital signature. This is done by authenticating users through Aadhaar's e-know your customer (e-KYC) service.

The project not only achieves efficiency in documentation, something that most people find incredibly annoying, but will also free up paperwork from the hold of the lower bureaucracy. In August last year, Modi had briefed his team on his vision for the project. "The Prime Minister was very clear that he didn't want copies of certificates issued by the government itself to be carried around by people to government offices for various services. For example, if a student is applying for a government college and has studied in a government-aided school, his birth certificate, identity details and educational certificates, school-leaving details et al should be accessible by organisations where he is applying. Similarly for medical records," he said.

Just like any fledgling IT project, there are bugs. We just spotted this hilarious one. But its in beta, so we expect only improvements.