Update: The Maharashtra Government will be issuing a notification for citizens to carry digital format of driving license, registration papers and permits for commercial vehicles. These will be treated as legal documents and will be accepted by all government agencies as genuine.
This ruling comes at a time when the Central Government amends Motor Vehicle Regulations making it mandatory for all documents related to vehicles to be stored on the government cloud based platform Digilocker. These documents so stored will be legal and treated as valid documents by all government agencies across the country.
An official from the office of transport commissioner said, “We want citizens to use the DigiLocker facility of government to store driving licence and registration certificates (RC). If you are asked by a traffic cop, you can simply switch on a smartphone and display your licence along with the vehicle RC.”
Even while as on date, the Traffic Police demand original smart cards from drivers for driving license, registration certificates and emission certification, once this ruling comes into effect, all vehicle owners can show off their documents via their smartphone or any other digital device whenever questioned by the traffic police.
Vehicle owners will no longer have to worry about smart cards being lost, damaged or mutilated and nor will they be able to state that they have forgotten to carry these documents. With the digital format, these documents will be easily accessible via Digilocker and will be accepted by all government agencies.
UPDATE – Earlier, we had mentioned that you can store photos of your ID cards in the DigiLocker App. But that is not correct. DigiLocker has tweeted the correct format is not photos, but digitally signed copies of your documents. Citizens will have to get electronically signed digital copies of their respective papers from the source, and then store them into the DigiLocker app. For example, you can get the electronically signed digital copy of your driving license from the RTO, and then store it on your phone’s DigiLocker app. Similarly, you can store other relevant documents into your DigiLocker app.
Digilocker is linked to citizens identity and has been validated via Aadhar and department data base available with the State e-Governance Department. All digital copies on Digilocker are mandated as per IT Act 2000.
