Plea against DigiLocker rules

News:The Delhi High Court has asked the Government to give its stand on a petition against the rules pertaining to the operation of DigiLocker.

Facts:

About the Petition:

• The petitioner has asked the apex court to strike down the Information Technology (Preservation and Retention of Information by Intermediaries Providing Digital Locker Facilities) Rules 2016 because DigiLocker does not provide a nomination facility under this rule.
• Because of this rule,all the documents would not be accessible by the family or friends and automatically get passed on to the government on the user’s death.

About Digital Locker:

• DigiLocker is the Indian Government’s flagship program under the Digital India.
• It is aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. 
• It is a platform for issuance and verification of documents & certificates in a digital way,thus eliminating the use of physical documents.
• It ties into Digital India’s visions areas of providing citizens a shareable private space on a public cloud and making all documents or certificates available on this cloud.

Benefits of Digital locker:

• Citizens can access their digital documents anytime, anywhere and share it online.This is convenient and time saving.
• It reduces the administrative overhead of Government departments by minimizing the use of paper.
• Digital Locker makes it easier to validate the authenticity of documents as they are issued directly by the registered issuers.
• Self-uploaded documents can be digitally signed using the eSign facility (which is similar to the process of self-attestation.