For Digital India Project revival, DEITY plans alternative authentication along with Aadhar

Several projects under Digital India program facing challenges as supreme court restriction over Aadhar project continues 

India: Supreme court has put a restriction on Aadhar program which is hampering the progress of multiple crucial projects under the program such as Digital Lockers. Therefore, the department of electronics and information technology (DEITY) seeks an alternative way to revive some the crucial projects.

As per the government officials, DEITY is discussing alternative means for five projects at present. For the Digital Locker project, authentication means such as e-KYC (Know your customer) of a bank, PAN card, and digital signatures are few options which are under consideration. Keeping in mind the Supreme court mandate, DIETY has to give other options to the citizens considering some of them might not have access to Aadhar.

Jeevan Pramaan or Digital Life Certificate for pensioners, e-sign, and Digitize India, the government records digitisation drive project are few other projects under Aadhar.

Jeevan Pramaan project aims to provide digital life certificates for disbursement of pensions to over 10 million pensioners. It is a biometric-enabled system built on Aadhaar. e-sign service is to provide digital authentication of documents through the Aadhaar. Likewise, Digitize India project, the government wants to digitize citizen’s record through crowd sourcing model.