V Muraleedharan, Union Minister of State for External Affairs on Friday inaugurates a DigiLocker service for Passport Seva. According to reports, now by using the DigitLocker service of the Government of India, any applicant can apply for passport related services from across India.
The press release by the Ministry of External Affairs stated, "With the launch of this new scheme, applicants applying for passport services can provide link to their specific documents uploaded in the DigiLocker. This would enable citizens to submit various documents required for Passport Services through DigiLocker in a paperless mode. They are not required to carry the original documents."
Launched as a key initiative under Digital India program, it provides citizens a shareable private space on a public cloud. All documents, links certificates are available on this platform.
"Targeted at paperless governance, DigiLocker is a platform for issuance and verification of documents/ certificates in a digital way, thus eliminating the use of physical documents. Further, once passports are also uploaded in DigiLocker, details would be easily accessible to authorized users from any location, which would be useful especially in case of loss of passport," the release further added.
The ministry further added, "The Ministry plans to roll out ePassport for citizens, which will increase security and improve facilitation of immigration processes at foreign airports. In the upcoming Passport Seva Programme V2.0, the use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Chat-Bot, Analytics, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), etc. will help ease the citizen experience and expeditious service delivery."