Published on Mar 04, 2023
DigiLocker is a "digital locker" service operated by the Government of India that enables Indian citizens to store certain official documents on the cloud. The service is aimed towards reducing the need to carry physical documents, and is part of the government's Digital India initiative.
1 GB of storage space is offered to users to store identification card issued by government agencies, education certificates, PAN cards, driving license, vehicle ownership documents and some other documents.
Users need to possess an Aadhar card to use DigiLocker. For sign-up, the Aadhar card number and the one-time password sent to the Aadhar-associated mobile number, need to be entered. For later log-ins, the user can set their own password or link the account to Facebook or Google logins.
The beta version of the service was rolled out in February 2015, and launched by the Prime Minister on 1 July 2015. The storage space provided was 10 MB initially, and was later increased to 1 GB.
In July 2016, DigiLocker recorded 20.13 lakh users with a repository of 24.13 lakh documents. The number of users saw a large jump of 7.53 lakh in April when the government had urged all municipal bodies to use DigiLocker to make their administration paperless.
From 2017, the facility was extended to allow students of ICSE board to store their class X and XII certificates in DigiLocker and share them with agencies as required. In February 2017, Kotak Mahindra Bank started providing access to documents in DigiLocker from within its net-banking application, allowing users to e-sign them and forward as needed. In May 2017, over 108 hospitals, including the Tata Memorial Hospital were planning to launch the use of DigiLocker for storing cancer patients' medical documents and test reports. According to a UIDAI architect, patients would be provided a number key, which they can share with another hospital to allow them to access their test reports.
There is also an associated facility for e-signing documents. The service is intended to minimise the use of physical documents, reduce administrative expenses, provide authenticity of the e-documents, provide secure access to government-issued documents and to make it easy for the residents to receive services.
The three key stakeholders of the DigiLocker platform are citizens, issuers and requesters. Let’s see how these stakeholders interact with the DigiLocker:
Citizens can store or access their documents using the DigiLocker. They can store either an uploaded or issued document on the DigiLocker.
Citizens may upload scanned copies of their important documents including the driving license, voter’s ID card (EPIC), passport, marks sheets, income tax statements, etc. They can use the DigiLocker to submit a digitally signed copy to a government agency if required by that agency. However, the agency must be registered as a requester with the DigiLocker.
These are e-documents that have been issued on the DigiLocker by a registered issuer who pushes the Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) of the e-documents to the digilockers of citizens, based on their Aadhaar numbers. These are stored in a central repository, and citizens can see and share their respective URI links.
Various government agencies are registered with DigiLocker as issuer and they can issue e-documents to citizens. These agencies include CBSE, Registrar Office, Income Tax Department, and so on. In 2016, CBSE issued the class 12th result, while NEET issued the rank letter, on DigiLocker. Also, all the CBSE results now onwards would be issued on DigiLocker. DigiLocker also provides the facility for issuers to issue legacy data but that would require Aadhaar seeding in the issuers’ legacy databases.
A requester, in the context of DigiLocker, is a government department that offers citizen services (the revenue department, a passport office or a municipality) or an organisation that requires documentation (banks, telcos, etc.). In order to provide a government service, a government agency needs to ascertain an individual’s identity, age or nationality, for which various standard and supporting documents issued by multiple government agencies may be required. In order to provide its services, the requester can request for digital versions of those documents and accept those online through the DigiLocker.
Each user’s digital locker has the following sections.
• My Certificates: This section has two subsections:
• 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 10MB in size. Only pdf, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp and gif file types can be uploaded.
• My Profile: This section displays the complete profile of the user as available in the UIDAI database.
• My Issuer: This section displays the issuers' names and the number of documents issued to the user by the issuer.
• My Requester: This section displays the requesters' names and the number of documents requested from the user by the requesters.
• Directories: This section displays the complete list of registered issuers and requesters along with their URLs.
Citizens can access their digital documents anytime, anywhere and share it online. This is convenient and time saving.
It reduces the administrative overhead of Government departments by minimizing the use of paper.
Digital Locker makes it easier to validate the authenticity of documents as they are issued directly by the registered issuers.
Self-uploaded documents can be digitally signed using the eSign facility (which is similar to the process of self-attestation).
Each resident’s DigiLocker account has the following sections:
i. Dashboard – This section is the first page you see when you login and shows a summary of all your documents.
ii. Issued Documents – This section shows the URIs (links) of the documents or certificates issued to you by the Govt. department or other agencies participating in DigiLocker.
iii. Uploaded Documents – This section shows all the documents which are uploaded by you. You can update the document type, eSign and share these uploaded documents.
iv. Shared Documents – This sections shows the list of documents which you share with others (via email).
v. Activity – This section is a log of the activities you performed in you DigiLocker account. The log included the details about the activities such as file upload, download, eSign etc.
vi. Issuers – This section lists the departments and agencies that are registered on DigiLocker as Issuers. If these departments have issued any document/certificate to you, it will appear in the form of a URI (link) in your Issued Documents section.
DigiLocker is safe and secure to use. We are taking all precautionary measures to ensure your data is protected and uncompromised. Please find the list of security measures that have been implemented till now. This list will expand as more safety features get added.
i. Standard Practices: DigiLocker follows standard software development practices of uniform coding standards, guidelines and reviews. Every release is reviewed and tested internally for security and penetration vulnerabilities before getting deployed on our servers.
ii. 256 Bit SSL Encryption: DigiLocker uses 256 bit secure socket layer (SSL) Encryption for information transmitted during any activity.
iii. Mobile Authentication based Sign Up: DigiLocker uses mobile authentication based signup via OTP (one time password) for authenticating users and allowing access to the platform.
iv. Aadhaar Authentication based Issued Document Access: To receive issued documents from registered issuers, citizens need to authenticate themselves using Aadhaar's Biometric or Mobile OTP authentication service.
v. ISO 27001 certified Data Centre: The application is hosted in a ISO 27001 security certified data centre.
vi. Data Redundancy: Data is backed up in secure environment with proper redundancy.
vii. Timed Log Out: To protect citizen’s account from unauthorized access, our system is designed to terminate session automatically if extended inactivity is detected.
viii. Security Audit: The DigiLocker application has been security audited by a recognized audit agency and the application security audit certificate has been obtained.
ix. User Consent Based System: The data from DigiLocker is shared only with the citizen's explicit consent. All sharing and access activities are logged and conveyed to the citizen. Organizations that need access to citizens' certificates need to register on DigiLocker and seek explicit consent from the citizen.
DigiLocker has partnered with CBSE for issuing digital mark sheets to 2016 Class XII students. Students who have registered their mobile number with CBSE would receive their DigiLocker account credentials through SMS, while those who don’t have their mobiles registered with CBSE would need to create a DigiLocker account with their mobile number, sync with their Aadhaar number and then pull their mark sheet from the CBSE databases. For step by step instructions on how to do this, please visit watch this demo: http://www.slideshare.net/digilocker_ind/how-cbse-students-can-get-their-digital-marksheets-from-digilocker
1. Signing up for DigiLocker is easy - all you need is your mobile number.
2. Your mobile number will be authenticated by sending an OTP (one-time password) followed by selecting a username & password. This will create your DigiLocker account.
3. After your DigiLocker account is successfully created, you can voluntarily provide your Aadhaar number (issued by UIDAI) to avail additional services.
There are two ways issued documents show up in DigiLocker -
This method works when the issuer database is seeded with the Aadhaar number of citizens. Once a registered issuer issues an e-document for a particular Aadhaar number (and the respective DigiLocker account already exists for that Aadhaar number), the URI for that document will be get pushed automatically into DigiLocker.
This method is used when the issuer database does not contain the seeded Aadhaar number. For certain issuers which have a partnership with DigiLocker, citizens can log into DigiLocker and pull their record from the issuer database using some common search parameters. Once the record is fetched, a permanent link (URI) to it can be saved in the issued document section.
In both cases, the URI (link) is available in issued documents section and this link directly fetches the document in real-time from the original data source.
i. Click the upload icon to start uploading a document. In the file upload dialog box, locate the file from your local drive and select 'open' to complete the uploading.
ii. To assign a document type to your uploaded file, click 'select doc type'. This will show a pop up with a drop down selection of various document types. Choose the appropriate document type and click 'save'.
iii. You can also edit the name of the file using the edit icon next to the filename.
