Centre proposes integrated digital identity system, seeks citizens’ opinions
India Today
The Centre has released a draft report on India Digital Ecosystem Architecture 2.0 (InDEA 2.0) and sought citizens’ comments on the same. Through InDEA 2.0, the government hopes to bring about Federated Digital Identities.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology (MeitY) has released a draft report on India Digital Ecosystem Architecture 2.0 or the InDEA 2.0 and sought citizens’ comments on the same. Through InDEA 2.0, the government hopes to bring about Federated Digital Identities.
In the draft report, the government has argued that digital identity is fundamental in enabling the citizen to answer the first question asked in any interaction with a public or private organisation ‘Who are you’. This question was previously answered using an Aadhaar card but it is not sufficient, the government said.
The steering committee which has released the draft report is headed by former MeitY secretary J Satyanaraya as chairman and current secretary Ajay P Sawhney as co-chairman.
"While Aadhaar seems to have answered this question at population scale in respect of all publicly funded schemes, the ministries and states are required to create several identities for the same citizen acting in different capacities like student, teacher, farmer, land owner, entrepreneur, customer of a bank, driver, owner of a vehicle, pensioner and so on," reads the document.
Further, the report says that InDEA 2.0 proposes a model of Federated Digital Identities that seeks to optimise the number of digital identities that a citizen needs to have. The model empowers the citizen by putting her in control of these identities and providing her the option of choosing which one to use for what purpose. It gives the agency to the citizen and protects privacy by design. The same logic holds for entities - the model is generic enough to establish an identity ecosystem for entities as well.
As per the report, the Centre hopes to create three kinds of digital registries, namely Digital Identity, Digital Assets and Digital Transactions.
The identity ecosystem will make it easier for citizens as government platforms across domains are digitised. The tendency to create additional IDs, each with its own card, management, etc., will be minimised.
