Federated Digital Identities

  • IASbaba
  • February 1, 2022
  • 0
UPSC Articles
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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

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