UPSC Articles
Federated Digital Identities
Part of: Prelims and GS-III Economy
Context: The government has invited stakeholder comments on a proposal that seeks to establish ‘Federated Digital Identities’ to optimise the number of digital identities that a citizen needs to have, by linking various consumer identification data into a single unique ID for digital transactions such as authentication and eKYC services.
Key takeaways
- The proposal is part of the Electronics and IT Ministry’s India Enterprise Architecture 2.0 (IndEA 2.0) framework
- As various government platforms across domains are being digitised, there is a tendency to create more IDs each with its own ID card, ID management, and effort to make it unique, etc.
- Having multiple IDs makes it harder for the common man himself.
- Especially given the diversity in education, awareness and capabilities, this also has a potential to further create exclusion scenarios.
About India Enterprise Architecture 2.0 (IndEA 2.0)
- IndEA 2.0 aims to enable the governments and the private sector enterprises to design IT architectures that can span beyond organisational boundaries for delivery of integrated services.
- 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 citizens and protects privacy-by-design.
- Electronic registries can be linked via the IDs to allow easy, paperless onboarding of citizens and also avoid repeated data verification needs.
For example
- When a beneficiary is registered for the PDS scheme, that record will be linked to Aadhaar by the PDS system storing the Aadhaar number (or a tokenised version of it).
- Similarly, when someone obtains a PAN, that record gets linked to Aadhaar where the Aadhaar number becomes the linking ID.
- Thus, if that person obtains a mutual fund account, the PAN, in turn, gets linked to the mutual fund record.
News Source: TH
