Now, Store and See Important Documents securely

You read the above headline absolutely right! No need of sitting with so many files piled up in front of you and searching important files and documents, fearing that you have either lost or misplaced them! That is all going to be a thing of the past, as the union government has announced a new online cloud-based locker service, which will take care of your important documents and files.

'DIGILocker' is the name given to a new digital locker service being initiated by the Narendra Modi government under its 'Digital India' programme. This was developed and released by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

The service was first developed in February 2015, in order to provide a secure dedicated personal electronic space for storing key documents of Indian citizens. It has been running in beta for a couple of months, and will be launched formally by the Prime Minister on July 1, 2015. It will be applicable to all the citizens of India.

The DIGILocker service is clear indication that the government wants to take the most documentation virtual, thus saving money and resources. This move can clearly reduce administrative overheads, time and space. It also brings about enhanced accountability and transparency and eliminates red-tape and corruption. It will minimize the use of physical documents and will provide authenticity of the e-documents.

It will allow users to store all kinds of government records and documents, ranging from PAN cards, income tax bills, electricity and water bills, Birth and Death certificates and so on. The citizens will be able to avail a maximum of 1GB storage space, by using their Aadhaar numbers to sign up and; with no limit on number of documents to be uploaded. However, each document cannot exceed 10 MB.

DIGILocker has partnered with Kleeto, a not-for-profit organisation, committed to ensure stability of the DIGILocker servers and propagating the disuse of paper, used for printing documents and files. Interestingly, other popular online services like Google Drive and DropBox offers storage and locker facilities, but you have to buy for upgrading your storage and security levels.

"Although transactions are increasingly becoming digital, physical creation of documents has not stopped. Even when you buy something from an e-commerce website, you will still get a receipt when it is delivered. With people owning more gadgets such as mobile phones, there are more warranty cards and user manuals to keep track of. This makes it difficult to manage documents," said Sunil Mahajan, the CEO of Kleeto.

He further added - “Technologically, there’s no difference between DigiLocker and Google Drive and DropBox, They are all giving you storage, but we are compromising on our tight privacy. When our government provides us something for free, the intent is not to store movies or media, but personal identifiable information like PAN Card and income tax files, which are quite sensitive and vulnerable to identity theft.”

This article is authored by Prateek Chakraborty, presently interning with DQ Channels.