Vehicle owners will soon be able to drive around without having to worry about carrying physical copies of their driving licence and the vehicle's registration certificate. This follows the government’s announcement on Tuesday to the effect that these documents would be integrated with the digital locker, which will enable commuters to access them online via mobile phones as and when required.
“This is a big reform in pushing paperless governance,” said Minister of IT and Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad. It will minimise the use of physical documents. The citizens will be able to share the digital certificates instead of paper copies with other departments as identity and address proof resulting in reduction of administrative overhead.”
He added that this would also help in the spot verification by various law enforcement authorities ,such as the traffic police, as the platform assures authenticity of documents since they are accessed directly from the source.
Eventually, the government plans to integrate vehicle insurance and other permits with the DigiLocker too.
“This is the first step towards making over 19 crore vehicle registration certificates and over 9 crore driving licenses available electronically,” said Nitin Gadkari, Minister for Road Transport and Highways.
He added that this system would eliminate corruption. “If someone is stopped anywhere, he or she can show (the) driving licence on mobile phone. This will benefit (the) common man and ensure a corruption-free, transparent system devoid of red-tapism,” he said.
Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and IT, Ajay Kumar pointed out that this is the largest such integration since Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the DigiLocker in July last year. The platform currently has over 21 lakh registered users with over 24 lakh uploaded documents.
“To increase the spread and reach of Digital Locker…the Ministry has recently notified Digital Locker rules which envisage (the set up) of a Digital Locker Authority under which it will be possible for other agencies apart from the government to set up Digital Lockers. This will create an environment of dematerialised documents something similar to dematerialised shares, which revolutionalised the share market.”
