In a major boost to the Digital India campaign, which ensures the government's services are made available to citizens electronically, the passport services were integrated with DigiLocker. This integration will enable citizens to avail passport services without any hassles of carrying physical documents.
DigiLocker is a key initiative under Digital India, a flagship program aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. DigiLocker provides citizens a sharable private space on a public cloud enabling the availability of all documents/certificates provided on this cloud. DigiLocker is a platform for issuance and verification of documents/ certificates in a digital way, thus eliminating the use of physical documents. It paves way for paperless governance, which has been the goal of the government.
Applying passport made paperless
With the help of DigiLocker, citizens can upload necessary documents on the app while applying for a passport via Passport Seva Kendra. Once supporting documents are uploaded, Passport Seva Kendra can access crucial documents such as Aadhaar, PAN Card, SSLC marks sheet, DL, Ration Card, and more in real-time for processing of an application. This eliminates the need to carry original physical documents, which simplifies the application procedure and processing time.
How to upload documents to DigiLocker?
If you've created a DigiLocker account and uploaded your documents, just open Passport Seva to share your documents when prompted.
If you don't have an account, you can sign up by entering your details such as full name, DOB, gender, mobile number, email address and Aadhaar number. Complete the OTP verification.
From thereon, you will be able to upload your documents. When you tap a particular document, you will be asked specific information that will help the app to fetch it from the records.
Applying for passport
Make sure all the supporting documents are uploaded to your DigiLocker account. Next, you can log in to Passport Seva, fill in the details and upload the documents where it is asked. You will need to grant access to DigiLocker. You can do so by signing in to your DigiLocker account. When you enter the OTP and give consent to Passport Seva to access your DigiLocker account, you will see the option "Fetch from DigiLocker" instead of "Grant DigiLocker Access." When you click it, you will get a success confirmation.
