Digi Locker: Dreamland or Dystopia?

What would you do if en route to a college for admission, you realize that you have lost all original documents you were carrying? By the time copies of thetranscripts arrive, the admissions would have closed.Your only hope then would be that the college takes a lenient view of the tragedy that befell you.

The Digi Locker Scheme, a national Digital Locker scheme, recently launched in its beta form by the Department of Electronics and Technology, under the Ministry of communications and IT would hope to reduce such dependence on luck. Images(or URI) of your documents can be uploaded accessedthrough your account, which will be linked to your Aadhaar card and mobile number.When the application is completely rolled out, up to 1 GB of space will be available per account, up from the10 MB currently available.

But then how is it any different from, let’s say Dropbox? It’s different in its official and government agencies would use it for issuance of documents as well. Upon execution of an e-KYC (Know your customer) by UIDAI, a person would be able to view the URI of any document uploaded by various issuers (e.g. Registrar Office, Income Tax Department). These could also be shared with agencies such as the Passport Office or a University should the need arise. A secure temporary access will be made available for documents stored in the repository to these offices.

Further, the e-sign feature that is part of the system is another move to reduce reliance on physical documents. Currently, a digital signature can be used at par with a traditional signature and requires a person’s identity verification and the issuance of a physical dongle that is secured using a password. Clearly, it would be too costly to scale this effort to the entire population. Instead, the E-sign facility uses Aadhaar e-KYC services to authenticate a signer.

This move to go paperless is indeed a remarkable move towards digitization, both for governance and delivery, but is wanting in guidelines and laws. The launch of a beta version is but one step in the larger scheme of things. A national rollout of the scheme is awaited, and so is the identification of which government agencies are to be on board. An implementing agency should be entrusted with architecture, implementation and operations, while an apex committee and a management unit to deal with governance issues needs to be underway.

But perhaps in the aftermath of the global surveillance disclosures against agencies like the NSA, what interests us most is the privacy of our data. A crucial first step in this process is defining what privacy is. In this case, it would be to ensure that the access to these documents remain secure, and for the eyes of the concerned agencies only. Safeguards need to be implemented for the use of this data and proper transparency and oversight guidelines need be established. A healthy mix of policy and technology may be needed to optimize any benefits that may accrue from this push towards digitization.

By DevanshiKulshreshtha & DevvartPoddar

Analysts at Collaborative Policy Consultants.