By Dr. J.K. Bhutani
The Government of India has launched the Digital Locker recently to mark Digital India week on 1st of July with a view to empower the people of the country through the Digital India Programme. The Government of India plans to take up a series of initiatives for developing various applications and portals that would go a long way in making the lives of the citizens better.
The participation of people has not been very encouraging, with the youth having poor user interface and security issues.
The Digital Locker: It will help all the citizens to digitally store their important documents like PAN card, passport, mark sheets and degree certificates, thus eliminating the use of physical documents and enable sharing of verified electronic documents across government agencies. Each citizen will get a maximum of 10MB storage space, which can later be increased to 1GB. To sign-up for your DigiLocker, one needs Aadhaar number and a mobile number that is linked to that Aadhaar number. Users can also link the account to their Google and Facebook accounts. Once you have registered, you can start uploading scanned documents like 10th class mark sheet, 12th class certificates, degree, PAN card, Voter ID card, etc. Each document should be less than 1MB in size and only in .pdf, .jpg, .png, .bmp or .gif format. Personal documents like health records, registered land deeds, marriage records and wills and conveyance deeds should be next possible options.
Time and technology are the great equalizer and empowering tools. The government before taking the credits must ensure that the interface is user friendly and state of the art. The additional facility of OCR can help identify the documents on its own. The cyber security issues are vital to ensure that personal documents like Pan Card, Passport and other details do not land up in wrong hands and misused. Unless these issues are addressed urgently the envisioned Digital India goals may not reach and benefit the citizens. The clarity on the issues and who owns the responsibility in case of a possible hack of data need more attention and implementation.
People we talked to are happy using their email attachments and Google drives for the same which have state of the art interface, large space and excellent security provisions.
Dr J.K.Bhutani MD is a protagonist of preventive and promotive health care based on austere biology and facilitating self healing powers of human organism.
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