How Digilocker, govt’s e-document app aided DU admissions and police recruitment

Nearly all admissions to undergraduate programmes in Delhi University for 2020-21 and a recruitment of over 4000 sub-inspector and constable-level police personnel in Karnataka had one thing in common as the country grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic — Digilocker.

Nearly all admissions to undergraduate programmes in Delhi University for 2020-21 and a recruitment of over 4000 sub-inspector and constable-level police personnel in Karnataka had one thing in common as the country grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic — Digilocker.

Digilocker

The mobile application, which is essentially a safe that stores personal documents of its users like driving licenses and education certificates, was launched in 2016 and has nearly 50 million users, according to officials familiar with the matter.

This is the first time that the University, which has so far only collected hardcopies of documents, digitally verified the certificates to expedite the admission process. DU admits over 65,000 students across 91 colleges. Karnataka, on the other hand, has become the first state to do recruitment using digital verification of even caste-certificates, reducing the duration of the recruitment process from nearly a year to six months, state officials said.

“Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for students graduating this year to obtain hardcopies of certificates of the class X and class XII results,” said an official on the condition of anonymity. “The hardcopies were not available during the admission window. However, PDF of the certificates became available on the same day the result was declared. These could be stored on Digilocker.”

The documents in the DigiLocker system are deemed to be at par with original physical documents as per Rule 9A of the Information Technology (Preservation and Retention of Information by Intermediaries Providing Digital Locker facilities) Rules, 2016. The documents can be verified in real-time using DigiLocker Scanner available on app and can also be verified online using APIs.

“The University of Delhi has acted as a pioneer in adopting these API based certificate verification during the pandemic time. More than 1.1 Lakh document verifications took place during 2020-21 admission and have resulted in the transformation of the admission process as simple, secure and robust,” a MEITY official said.

Hindustan Times reached out to an official in Department of Admissions of DU but did not receive a response immediately.

For the Karnataka police department, the use of Digilocker has spliced nearly six months from their recruitment process. “Ours is an annual process,” said deputy inspector general if police recruitment in Karnataka Pravin Madhukar Pawar. “This year, 2019-20, we had to recruit 603 people for sub-inspector level post and 3560 for countable rank officials. The most time-consuming part of our job is certificate verification as it involves multiple departments.”

Digilocker issued 64 accounts and passwords for different departments for recruitment. The user doesn’t need to upload the documents, since the app has a database up until a certain date.

Pawar added that the effort was minimized after an API was set up on Digilocker, which integrates the interface for all the departments. “We can now do the verifications in under five minutes,” he said.

The process is likely to be used for future recruitments, a state government official said.

“Normally, from the date of issuing a notification for vacancies to finally handing the appointment letters, the process takes a year,” Pawar said. “Of that, six to eight months is verification of documents, but now that process is much easier.”