Good Governance Tool 2: e-Sign

 Relief

Biggest bottle neck for meaningful e-Governance is signature from public for application or proceedings or witness or acknowledgment or receipt etc., which is inked form, i.e., signed on paper.

Final objective of government is to serve public at various capacity. To make it convenient and easy, government has organised itself in to various departments. And departments have developed software application to cater public seamlessly, with efficient way. Since large public don’t have DSC to sign electronically, it became a kind of hybrid system.

Ink signed Application and documents/certificates were scanned either in image format or in non-searchable PDF format. Best of the best Optical Character Reader (OCR) has its own limitation. And hence large chunk of unusable data has been created, leading to multiple data entry at different level with error inputs and multi formats, leading to chaos. And also increasing the storage cost at data centres.

 The only way to check this is to sign every document digitally at the various level i.e., at the time of application / letters / memorandums/ receipt/ acknowledgment etc., submission.

 Even though Digital Signature Certificate (DSC) were existing for quite long time, its scalability to the common man was the biggest challenge, besides its maintenance, renewal, browser settings etc. Since we have huge ignorance on cyber hygiene, it is more prone for of impersonation risk too. Only the needy have DSC. Because of this lacuna, electronic governess was forced to do maximum translation and minimum transformation.

If this is the case, can every citizen in the country be provided with electronic signature. If it was prior to 2016, the answer would have been big no.  But now, it is big yes. Now every person who has Aadhaar can sign electronically. How, it is very simple. Where there is need to sign any document you just have to provide Aadhaar number and enter OTP, received to the mobile phone, registered with Aadhaar. For this the departmental software application should have been integrated with e sign service providers (this is departments job).

Aadhaar eSign has legal and evidentiary value equivalent to that of wet (hand-written) signatures.  In fact, digital signatures including Aadhaar eSigns can have more evidentiary weight than wet signatures. The infrastructure for Aadhaar eSign  is provided by the UIDAI and the Controller of Certifying Authorities, Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India through intermediaries known as eSign Service Providers (ESPs) and Application Service Providers (ASPs).

When we started implementing e-sign in our state, we were chasing every department to adopt this for every services. Initially with little reluctance few departments adopted it and after realising the value, they started demanding more. e-Sign became part of the high level review.  As of now 55 departments in Karnataka are using e-Sign for various service.

Days are not far, where there won’t be any ink signed application / certificates. Every document will be e Signed and all certificates will be pushed & stored in Digilcoker. Use of paper will be minimal in the days to come.

It’s a big relief.

 

Silent Feature of Information Technology Act on e-Sign

•The IT Act, 2000  provides legal sanctity to electronic signatures

•Electronic signatures are accepted at par with hand written signatures

•Electronic documents that have been electronically signed are treated at par with paper documents signed in the traditional way

•The IT Act provides the basic legal and administrative framework for ecommerce, and promotes its growth by creating trust in electronic environment

 

Disclaimer: Purely personal opinion.