What is the true meaning of a certificate? I found asking myself the question while reading about some Andhra Pradesh colleges withholding certificates from nursing students and asking them to work for a “service period” of a year in an affiliated hospital before being “released”. A nurse quoted in the story was planning to apply for a job in her home state, Kerala, using the certificate. The coercive clause delayed her life plan.
It’s baffling how such a modern form of bonded labour exists, under which apart from paying college fees one has to work for a stipulated period too. No wonder the legal validity of such a contract is facing public interest litigation now.
But I do understand collaterals. The talk of an ‘original certificate’ brought back memories of thick papers signed by calligraphic hands, with stamps of approval that made faking difficult. One carefully saved a ‘provisional’ certificate, followed by its ‘original’. Employers usually returned the original after inspection of copies duly attested by a government officer or an equivalent. But then, there were some nasty employers who held back the originals as collaterals to prevent employees from leaving.
Legally, a certification is proof of qualification that the dictionary defines as “action or process of providing someone or something with an official document attesting to a status or level of achievement”. By that yardstick, the Supreme Court has clarified that Aadhaar is sufficient as a certificate of residency to enable a voter identity, but not as a proof of citizenship. The prime minister’s postgraduation certificate has been a subject of legal banter over its verification.
All such questions, however, should be buried in the sands of time with new technologies that enable easy, foolproof verification and transmission. We know about the biometrics that go with Aadhaar, whose project leader Nandan Nilekani pointed out that it is a “number, and not a card”. What is often touted as an Aadhaar card is a printout reporting the unique identification number. This essentially means that an Aadhaar number is associated with a person with certifiable features, including a proof of residency.
What we are waiting for now is the Aadhaar revolution’s equivalent in certificates concerning education, academic credits and experience, and evolve from the current know your customer framework to another KYC—know your candidate.
We have the DigiLocker model cutting across educational institutions and domains to stop the exploitation of students and job-seekers and reduce bureaucratic red tape, but progress has been slow. It needs to be adopted the way we have done with land records.
As India marks 50 years of the cult classic Sholay, I recall visiting Ramanagara, the film’s hilly shooting site that is also a pioneering area for digitisation of farm records. I was taken on the pleasant drive outside Bengaluru by Rajeev Chawla, the IAS officer who led Karnataka’s Bhoomi project, which became a case study on e-governance at Princeton University.
Chawla showed me how digitisation, once done, meant that a farmer could get a bank loan against a printout directly verifiable with government records, and bypass corrupt local record-keepers (patwaris) who could harass them. Last year, the Union government reported that 95 percent of India’s rural land records have now been digitised—after early struggles by the likes of Chawla, who had to train people, forge technology partnerships and build processes that made it all possible.
In certification, DigiLocker holds promise as a secure, cloud-based platform allowing citizens to store, access, and share digital copies of their official documents including Aadhaar, driving licences, and educational certificates. This allows real-time document verification, secure sharing with unique document codes, and user-controlled access. The verification works through digitally signed and secure QR codes on documents so that details are authenticated against the signature and data stored by the issuer in the DigiLocker system.
People like the harassed nursing student in Andhra Pradesh should embrace this, and the government needs to loudly advertise it.
Under India’s IT laws, universities must accept documents from DigiLocker National Academic Depository (NAD) as legally valid alternatives to physical copies. However, they are not mandatorily bound to join the system—and that is a loophole impeding faster adoption.
The government has been setting deadlines for institutions to join the NAD, and the University Grants Commission has also been stepping up pressure on affiliated bodies. The DigiLocker scheme was launched in 2015 and the NAD in 2017. Evidently, the pace of progress has not matched that of Aadhaar usage. Both state-level universities and private institutions need to be pressured to embrace the NAD.
The arrival of blockchain as a technology to store records in a foolproof way strengthens the system. The NAD already uses blockchain for storing degrees from many accredited institutions. Blockchain stores certificates with unique digital footprints in an immutable, decentralised ledger to prevent forgery at any level.
What we could do is not only legally and administratively push private institutions to make the DigiLocker system as ubiquitous as Aadhaar, and add digitally-signed contracts to it. This might save people from falling prey to dubious private contracts that often fail to withstand legal scrutiny.
Madhavan Narayanan | REVERSE SWING | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)