Now, no need to carry driving licence – use DigiLocker

Now, motorists need not carry around physical copies of their vehicle registration certificate or driving licence – these can all be stored digitally with the DigiLocker, a secured cloud-based platform.

The government on Wednesday launched the integration of vehicle registration and driving licenses with the DigiLocker. People can instead access digital copies of the documents on their mobile phones through the DigiLocker mobile app.

"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 used as identity and address proof.

The service was jointly launched by Information and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Road, Transport, Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari at Transport Bhawan in New Delhi.

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.

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

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.

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.

With the launch of the service the National Register System has got integrated with DigiLocker, making over 19 crore vehicle registration certificates and over nine 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 the statement.

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 in the ministry of road transport and highways, 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," Debabrata Naik, project director of DigiLocker told IANS.