There are huge number of documents to keep and manage, and the government also seems to have taken notice. As part of Digital India week on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially launched a digital locker service called DIGILocker, though the service was soft-launched sometime back in beta stage.
So what exactly is DIGILocker? Very simply, it's a website where you can store your various government issued documents, using your Aadhaar card as your identification. While it hasn't been stated as such, to us, it also looks like a good way of bringing data from different government agencies together under the aegis of the Aadhaar card, potentially making the document more useful to people carrying it.
To sign up, you need only enter your Aadhaar number, and an SMS is set out to the mobile phone number you registered at UIDAI. This one-time-password is the only way to get inside your DIGILocker for the first time, but afterwards, you can set your own userid and password or link the DIGILocker to your Google or Facebook login.
After you've signed up, you can upload your government documents to the DIGILocker - there's only 10MB of storage at present (later you will get 1 gigabyte of storage) - but you can also save the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of government documents using DIGILocker.
The idea is that this should minimise the need for physical documents; if your birth and education certificates are online, and you apply for a passport, then the Passport Office could use your Aadhaar number to request the DIGILocker for your details.
There's also a planned e-Signature facility with DIGILocker, though that will be launched later; between digital signatures and government documents in the cloud, it is clear that the government wants to make it easier for people to use government services online. DIGILocker will be a way to authentically curate your documents, and make it easy to share them to different departments.
There's also the question of security. While the DIGILocker website looks to have the basics in place by using HTTPS for the main part of the website.
To access your digital locker, visit DIGILocker and you can sign up now for free with your Aadhaar details.
