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.
