PATNA: Around 1.7 crore ration cards with 8.1 crore members in Bihar are now linked with the Digilocker App to avail the direct benefits of the ration card scheme.
With this kind of digital facility made available with the citizenry, Bihar has become the country's sixth state after Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Haryana,Kerala and Karnataka to add "Ration Cards" to the list of integrated documents, issued by the government, in the Digilocker app wallet.
As per an official figure, around 1.7 crore ration cards with 8.1 crore members are active in Bihar, who can now benefit from this newly integrated document in the DigiLocker wallet. "This will enable the people to have direct access to their Ration Cards from DigiLocker App," said Bihar IT secretary Santosh Kumar Mall.
Sharing details, Mall said that the 'DigiLocker Document Wallet' is integrated with documents issued by six different departments of the Bihar government. "In total, 19 documents issued by the government of Bihar's six different departments can be retrieved directly from the DigiLocker App. Prominent among other departments of Bihar government are the Bihar State Board of School Examination, the food and consumer production department's ration cards, the general administration department, the Labour Resource department, the transport department and others," he said.
"The Food and Consumer Production department of state government has played a critical role in completing this task by sharing the database of ration card holders in Bihar with the Department of Information Technology, which integrated the DigiLocker App with the ration card, allowing Cardholders in Bihar to access their Ration Card from their DigiLocker wallet from anywhere," Mall said.
So far, 1572 ration card holders in the state have retrieved the document from the DigiLocker and the numbers are expected to grow exponentially in the coming days.
"Bihar is moving away from manual registering and human errors in order to create an intervention-free model of automation and be it known to all that the digital copies, accessed through the DigiLocker app, are treated as original documents under the country's Information Technology Act 2000," Mall said.
He elaborated that the documents once downloaded to the synced folder on a mobile device can also be accessed even in offline mode as the app has been given a 1GB capacity for uploading any document to the app's folder.
He said that using the Aadhaar number, one can also verify his or her identity. "Once verified, the desired document can be searched using the Document or Reference number and can also be saved for offline use," he said.