Digital Locker is one of the key initiatives under the Digital India initiative. This initiative is aimed at eliminating the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across government agencies via a mechanism to verify the “authenticity” of the documents online. Digital Locker is a service launched by the Indian government in February 2015. This service offers a safe and exclusive personal electronic storage space for resident citizens of India to store documents.
Digital locker is a topic that is important from both the governance and the science and tech point of view. It is a part of the governmental schemes section in the UPSC syllabus. It also comes under the latest science and technology segment.
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Aspirants can visit the Government Schemes in India page and get a comprehensive list of programmes and policies introduced by the Government of the country.
Digital Locker – UPSC Notes:-Download PDF Here
About Digital Locker
- DigiLocker is a key initiative under Digital India, the Indian Government’s flagship program aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
- Digital Locker is a system to provide citizens with real-time access to dematerialised documents issued by various Government and Private Agencies.
- The Digital Locker shall provide citizens with a shareable private space on a public cloud and make all documents/certificates available on this cloud itself.
- This digital space can be utilized for storing personal documents such as university certificates, PAN cards, voter IDs, the URIs of the e-documents issued by various departments.
- The objective of the service is to decrease the use of physical documents and also to offer authenticity to e-documents.
- It shall also provide secure access to documents issued by the government.
- It also aims to deflate the expenses on the administrative front of the various governmental departments.
Digital Locker is one of the major initiatives under the Digital India Campaign of the Government of India and was released by the Electronics and Information Technology Department of the Indian Government.
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Objectives of Digital Locker
Given below are the key objectives with which the Digital Locker was introduced by the Government of India:
- To Enable digital empowerment among the citizens of the country
- To minimize the physical usage of documents and enable the feature of e-signing by making documents available electronically
- Digital Locker will increase the authenticity of documents by online upload and reduce the existence of fake documents
- Web portals and mobile applications shall be made available for easy access
- Reduce the administrative overhead of Government departments and agencies
- With the availability of documents online on the cloud, residents can easily access the documents anytime and anywhere
- Make sharing of documents easy
- Ensure privacy and authorized access to residents’ data
Digital Locker Ecosystem
Source – Digital Locker Authority Website
The main components of the Digital Locker Ecosystem are:
- Citizens – An individual who uses the Digital Locker service based on the Aadhaar number.
- Issuers – Any public or private sector entity/organisation/department issuing digitally signed e-documents to individuals/entities and making them available within a repository for access through a digital locker of their choice. The issuer is also responsible to revoke/invalidate their own documents.
- Requestors – An entity/organisation/department requesting secure access with user consent to specific e-documents stored across the ecosystem to provide paperless service to end users.
Components of Digital Locker
- Dedicated 10 MB free personal storage space, linked to each resident’s Aadhaar, to securely store e-documents and to store URI links of e-documents for accessing them directly from the repositories
- This 10 MB space shall be extended to 1 GB in the coming years
- There are three main technology components of the Digital Locker:
- Repository – It is a Collection of e-Documents that are uploaded by issuers in a standard format
- Access Gateway – It provides a secure online mechanism for requesters to access e-documents from various repositories in real-time using e-Document URI (Uniform Resource Indicator)
- DigiLocker Portal – It is a dedicated cloud-based personal storage space, linked to each resident’s Aadhaar for storing e-documents, or URIs of e-documents.
- An online portal has been launched by the Government where the residents can login in and register themselves
Digital Locker – UPSC Notes:-Download PDF Here
Frequently Asked Questions about DigiLocker
What is DigiLocker?
What has been the progress regarding DigiLocker?
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.
In July 2016, DigiLocker recorded 20.13 lakh users with a repository of 24.13 lakh documents.
Aspirants must know that questions based on Digital Locker may be asked in the Science and Technology part of the syllabus. Thus, candidates can visit the linked article and get the list of Important Chapters in NCERT for Science & Technology for UPSC exam preparation.
All Government exam candidates can get the best Preparation Strategy for Competitive Exams at the linked article.
For any further information regarding the latest exam updates, study material and preparation tips, candidates can turn to BYJU’S for expert assistance.
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