Digital signature usage to double in India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: With e-governance spreading its reach to the citizens of the country, India is seeing spurt growth of digital signature usage within a year's time.

“India witnessed more than three lakh entities using digital signature for filing income tax return in this year. This was one instance. People have massively started using online banking where digital signatures are going to play an important role. Soon various e-governance projects are expected to start issuing and accepting digitally signed documents. These are the signs which show that usage of digital signature will easily double in the country,” said Jagdeep Kochar, chairman, India PKI Forum, in an interaction with CIOL, on the sidelines of a symposium held by PKI Forum to discuss the scope of digital signature in India.

Kochar mentioned that in the month of last September, his company (n)Code Solutions alone issued 52000 digital signature certificates.

Kochar pointed out Gujarat and Maharasthra were running pilot digital signature projects on operations of their treasury departments and these states will soon adopt the use of digital signature as part of their operations.

“In case of police complaints also these two states are expected to start use of digital signature. Unique ID Authority of India is going to use digital signature which will increase the number of users by multiple fold,” said Dr N Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying Authority in Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, who was present at the occasion.

Kochar added that PKI forum is working out ways to address challenges that exist in adoption of digital signature.

“We are seeing active user base developing in India. Hence, we decided to host Asia PKI International Symposium in India for the first time,” said Kochar.

The symposium will end on Friday evening after discussion around various topics namely PKI and digital signature case studies, mobile PKI, challenges in digital signature forensics, interoperability, key length and encryption issues.

“One of our big challenge during this symposium will be find out ways in which we can come up a common international standard for use of digital signatures,” said Kochar.