Passport application in India is made even easier as Union Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan on Friday launched a new scheme by which an applicant can benefit from the DigiLocker platform of the Government of India while applying for passport-related services from anywhere in India.
The Passport Seva Program has introduced major digital transformation in delivery of Passport Services in the last six years. With the launch of this new scheme, applicants applying for passport services can now 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.
Muraleedharan said that now, applicants are not required to carry the original documents. "I would also like to add here that as a next step, we are working on the idea of a passport to be included as one of the documents in DigiLocker. Moving forward, I am confident that this will help the citizens to retrieve the passport whenever required," he said. In case of loss of passport and while reissuance, this facility will be of great help, the minister pointed out.
Note that 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.
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.
It is worth adding that in the last 6 years, there has been a significant improvement in passport-related services. In fact, the Ministry is also planning to roll out ePassport for citizens soon, which will increase security and improve the 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.
