Now, Indians will drive in peace with digital documents

You can now drive with your driving licence, vehicle registration certificate and insurance papers safely kept at home as the government launched this facility with DigiLocker, which transport minister Nitin Gadkari said would arrest corruption and bring in transparency .
You can access digital copies of the documents on the mobile phone using the DigiLocker app.

Road transport and IT ministries jointly launched on Wednesday integration of DigiLocker with driving licences (DLs) and vehicle registration certificates (RCs), which enables the user to download these digitally verified documents.Under this arrangement, the transport ministry's National Register has been integrated with DigiLocker.

Once the data from the remaining RTOs is updated in the National Register, the digital copies of those driving licences and vehicle registration certificates will also be available via DigiLocker.

This is seen as the largest integration under DigiLocker system so far as the national registry of the transport ministry has 19.6 crore RCs and 9.2 crore DLs.

Since the source of such digitally verified documents is government entities, these will be deemed valid by law enforcement agencies including traffic police. This will effectively free people from the hassle of carrying paper documents everywhere they go.

"All such downloaded documents will have the QR code to authenticate them and as per the IT Act all digitally signed documents will be treated at par with the physical issued documents," said an IT ministry official. He said they will soon start campaigns to make personnel of all enforcement agencies aware of this provision.

Launching the service, Gadkari said,"There will be a few, who will be unhappy as they will no more have `Lakshmi Darshan' (bribe money)." IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said DigiLocker will prove to be a programme for transforming India and achieving the vision of paperless governance.

In order to access the digital RC and DL, one needs to first sign up for a DigiLocker. He then needs to download the DigiLocker app. In the mobile app he will have to select the issued documents section. The enforcement personnel such as traffic police can verify the soft copies offline using the QR code.

(Source: The Times of India, Kolkata dated 2016-09-08)