Imagine losing your wallet. It is not just about money but the driving license, identity cards, insurance documents — the bureaucratic evidence of your being here. The process of getting them back is a nightmare, all lines and forms. Now, think about a world where the physical wallet is meaningless, and the government verifies your documents on a digital cloud under your control. That is the pitch of DigiLocker, and India is now showing how to make it happen.
The Deal: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)
Nowhere is this more evident than in the framework of cooperation signed between India and Kenya. It is not a trade deal for wheat or oil; it is a trade deal for code and governance. India is assisting Kenya in establishing a pilot on the “DigiLocker-based” system. That’s under the canopy of DPI—Digital Public Infrastructure.
Consider DPI to be akin to road construction. Just as a government creates highways for private cars and trucks to drive on — which stimulate economic activity, thereby generating tax returns sufficient to cover the cost of the roads — India has built “digital highways” (like UPI for money and DigiLocker for documents) that enable citizens and businesses to move faster. Kenya, seeking to modernize its own administrative systems, is helping itself to blueprints for these digital highways.
What is DigiLocker, Really?
For the uninitiated, DigiLocker is more than just Google Drive for government files. If you take a picture of your driver’s license and upload it to Google Drive, that’s just an image. A police officer is under no obligation to take it.
DigiLocker is an exception as it connects to the “source of truth”. The app accesses the Transport Department’s server in real-time and checks, when you fetch your license on DigiLocker, “Okay, this is a person who has a valid license. It is the same as the original, for all legal purposes.
By exporting this technology to Kenya, India is offering a resource where Kenyans can keep their birth certificates, tax receipts and property titles in one protected state-backed cloud. It frees the “middleman” corruption that can thrive in paper-heavy bureaucracies, and throttles identity theft, since a digital chain of custody is more difficult to forge than one printed on pasteboard.
The Global Shift
Why does this matter? It represents a sea change in India’s posture on the international stage. Today, India is shifting from the world’s back-office (supporting) to becoming the tech architect (the building base).
For the Kenyan user, this pilot project holds out the prospect of a future in which they won’t have to bring a folder full of papers to a bank to open an account. They could just digitally authorize the verified ID behind them. It reduces friction. But it also creates questions around data sovereignty and security. Collecting such data for a nation requires fortress-like security. As Kenya embraces this model, the arrangement will most likely include not only the software itself but also security protocols to ensure that the digital vault stays locked tight against hackers. It is a courageous stride down the path toward an open, do-no-harm paperless future.
