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Here’s all you wanted to know about digital locker

The GOI is set to unveil its ambitious and largest digitized public service till date—the digital lockers next week. Here's all you want to know about it

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Sonal Desai
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MUMBAI, INDIA: Exactly a week from today, the Government of India, will unveil one of its most ambitious and largest digitized public service till date—the digital locker.

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Digital lockers or digilockers are they are more popularly known, are secure online lockers that will allow you to store all your documents online. The lockers will be hosted on a cloud platform.

The main aim of the scheme is to provide the government agencies, recruitment heads and the people access to important documents like passport, educational and Pan Card over cloud storage from anywhere globally, anytime. The best part is that we will not have to carry physical documents any longer!!!

In short, the service will let you upload scans or PDFs of a range of documents from utility bills to education certificates and other documents issued by the government. There is also space to save Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of other documents. Once the service is launched, you will see a Save URI to digilocker option appear after utility payments and receipt of documents. For now, you can start by downloading your Aadhaar and saving it in the locker.

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The services will be jointly operated by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), the IT vendors and other stake holders.

How to apply for a digilocker?

The first step to apply for a digilocker is to create an account by using your Aadhaar card or unique identification (UID) number.

The process is simple:

1. Login to http://digitallocker.gov.in

2. Once you enter your Aadhaar Number, you will receive an OTP send to your registered number and email address. The window will open to the following pages:

3. My certificates: This section comprises of two sub sections:

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 1MB in size. Only pdf, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp and gif file types can be uploaded.

4. My profile: This section displays the complete profile of the user as available in the UIDAI database.

5. My issuer: This section displays the issuers' names and the number of documents issued to the user by the issuer.

6. My requester: This section displays the requesters' names and the number of documents requested from the user by the requesters.

7. Directories: This section displays the complete list of registered issuers and requesters along with their URLs.

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The government has listed the following benefits of digital locker:

• Enable e-signing of documents, electronic availability and minimizing the use of physical documents.

• Ensure authenticity of the e-documents, thereby eliminating usage of fake documents.

• Secure access to government issued documents through a Web portal and mobile application for residents.

• Reduce administrative overhead of the government departments and agencies, easy availability of services.

Security concerns:

The GoI has also taken care of your security concerns.

Indian citizens will be able to avail a maximum of 10MB storage space, using their Aadhaar numbers to sign up. Once the Aadhaar number has been entered, a one-time password (OTP) will be sent to your registered mobile phone to initiate the first log-in. After that, users would be able to set their own passwords, and line the account to Google and Facebook for easy access in future.

Besides, it has adopted an open and interoperable standards-based architecture to support a well-structured standard document format to support easy sharing of documents across departments and agencies.

In the future:

The government is also launching an e-signature service with digilocker. While only certain kind of digital signatures have acceptance at the moment, this move could provide a nationwide push for digital authentication of documents.

However, it is not clear how the state and the central governments will integrate the digital locker.

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