Now, Drive Without Documents; Centre Unveils DigiLocker App

New Delhi: Now, you don’t need to carry
around physical copies of the Certificate of Vehicle Registration
(RC) and Driving Licence as these can all be stored digitally thanks
to the DigiLocker, a secured cloud-based platform.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Information
and Telecom Minister, and Nitin Gadkari, Union Road, Transport,
Highways and Shipping Minister, on Wednesday jointly launched the
cloud-based application here at the Transport Bhawan.

The newly launched the DigiLocker
mobile App, users can integrate Vehicle Registration and Driving
Licenses with the DigiLocker. With DigiLocker, people can instead
access digital copies of the documents on their mobile phones through
the DigiLocker mobile app.

Nitin Gadkari, Union Road, Transport, Highways and Shipping MinisterThis platform is a major step forward towards ensuring greater transparency and cutting down corruption and red-tapism. The move will benefit a large number of people by facilitating ease of access to the documents.”“Driving Licenses and Vehicle Registration documents can now be issued directly to the DigiLockers of individuals in digital formats  

Gadkari said: “This platform is a
major step forward towards ensuring greater transparency and cutting
down corruption and red-tapism. The move will benefit a large number
of people by facilitating ease of access to the documents.”

“Driving Licenses and Vehicle
Registration documents can now be issued directly to the DigiLockers
of individuals in digital formats,” according to a statement,
which added that the digital copies can be shared with other
departments as identity and address proof.

The service will also be used for
on-the-spot verification through the person’s mobile, by law
enforcement authorities like Traffic Police. Besides being convenient
for people, it will also result in assured authenticity of such
documents and reduction of administrative overhead.

Stating that the launch will bring a
paradigm shift towards the vision of paperless governance, Prasad
said: “It will serve to bring agility and efficiency to the
entire process of issuance of driving licenses and vehicle
registration certificates through IT enablement.”

DigiLocker is an application which aims
at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and
knowledge economy. It is a platform for issuance and verification of
documents and certificates digitally.

According to government, with the launch of the service National Register System has got integrated with DigiLocker, making over 19 crore Vehicle Registration Certificates and over 9 crore driving licenses available in the citizens’ lockers.

As per the government, when a person
signs up for a DigiLocker he gets access to a dedicated cloud storage
space for his important documents. DigiLocker currently has 21,26,332
registered users with 24,11,702 uploaded documents and has issued
over 4,26,73,232 documents as on Sep 1, 2016.

According to government, with the
launch of the service National Register System has got integrated
with DigiLocker, making over 19 crore Vehicle Registration
Certificates and over 9 crore driving licenses available in the
citizens’ lockers.

“Once the data from the remaining
RTOs is updated in the National Register Systems, the digital copies
of those driving licenses and vehicle registration certificates will
also be available through DigiLock,” said a statement from the
Government.

Instructions issued to use the
DigiLocker says that in order to access the digital RC and DL a
person needs to first sign up for a DigiLocker. The person then needs
to download the DigiLocker Android App from Google PlayStore. In the
Mobile App the person will have to select the Issued Documents
section and then the DL/RC.

“Field staff like the Traffic
Police can do off line verification of RC/DL using QR Code. Apart
from the mobile view version, digitally signed documents can also be
accessed electronically, and these will be at par with the physical
issued documents as per IT Act 2000.”

Abhay Damle, Joint Secretary at
Ministry of Road Transport and Highway said that the, ministry is
working towards integrating even documents like vehicle insurance and
fitness certificates to DigiLocker.

“Such intelligence is also
important to ensure that the documents of one person are not used by
another person. This will halt such malpractices,” said
Debabrata Naik, Project Director of DigiLocker.

Source: IANS