DigiLocker Enables Digital Driving Licence and Vehicle Registration Papers

With our records getting increasingly digitised, the continuing reliance on physical documents can be a little inconvenient. A government initiative could change this, and we are seeing some of the first fruits get underway now. You can now get a digital driving license and vehicle registration that you can carry around in your phone, with all the requisite security measures.

A year ago, the government launched the DigiLocker, a digital locker for all your government documents. Now, DigiLocker has partnered with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways to allow you to get a digital driving license and vehicle registration certificate. Once your state equips police and other officials with the app to verify these documents, you'll be able to leave your physical documents behind when you're driving.

Using this is pretty simple - you sign up to the DigiLocker Android application which verifies your phone number using an OTP. You then need to enter your Aadhaar details into the app to start uploading documents - you can upload your own scanned documents, and then there are issued documents, which are e-documents issued by the different government agencies.

Up until now, you had to upload the driver's licence yourself, but with the platform launched, it gets simpler to have a digital copy of your driver's license and registration. These documents can be viewed by officials who will have their own version of the DigiLocker app, and it can also be used to issue penalty points.

It's a big step towards making it easier to have control over all your documents, though in practice, the DigiLocker app and website report frequent access problems - multiple commenters on Google Play complain about not getting OTPs, and frequent crashes - something we also experienced.

When it works, the app seems fairly useful, but there are definite issues in execution that we hope will be resolved soon.