Moving towards paperless governance, Tamil Nadu has directed all government departments and their subordinate agencies to adopt DigiLocker System to provide access to digital documents to citizens as envisaged in Information Technology (Preservation and Retention of Information by Intermediaries providing Digital Locker facilities) Rules, 2016.
DigiLocker, a flagship initiative of the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the Digital India Program, is a platform to access the documents and certificates issued by an authority and digitally verify the same, thus eliminating the use of physical documents.
A government order issued by Tamil Nadu Information Technology Secretary, Neeraj Mittal, says that all the government departments shall integrate all their existing/ongoing/future software applications with DigiLocker and register themselves as an issuer or a requester or both as required.
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All government departments and their agencies are directed to take necessary steps to integrate their current software applications with DigiLocker for issuing and verifying certificates and ensure that all certificates already issued and to be issued in future, are made available on the DigiLocker platform.
The Director of e-Governance & Chief Executive Officer, TNEGA, will provide necessary support to the Government Departments / PSUs/Statutory Authorities / Autonomous Bodies / Universities and Educational Institutions / Agencies for the adoption of DigiLocker, the order said.
Digital empowerment
The DigiLocker system aims at the “digital empowerment” of citizens by providing a document wallet to citizens to access authentic documents/certificates in digital format from the source of truth thereby, promoting the vision of paperless governance.
It aims to provide a digital wallet to every citizen so that all the documents can be made electronically in one place and can be accessed from anywhere anytime. The documents in the DigiLocker system are deemed to be at par with original physical documents.
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Departments/Organisations that get registered with DigiLocker as ‘Issuer Organisation’ can provide electronic copies of documents and certificates issued by them (eg. driving license, voter ID, certificates/mark sheets, ration card, licenses/permits issued by various departments, etc.) directly into a citizen’s DigiLocker account.
Similarly, Departments can register as ‘Requester Organisation’ and integrate their online application with DigiLocker to enable the citizens to fetch supporting documents required for various online applications (eg. application for certificates, licenses, jobs, subsidies, pensions, scholarships, admission in schools/colleges) of the respective departments, directly from their DigiLocker.
The government of India has also requested to adopt DigiLocker as a platform for providing authentic documents/certificates and to accept the documents shared through DigiLocker, the Order said.
