The government is developing a platform to help citizens, who store their documents in DigiLocker to auto-update their address and other demographic details across departments through Aadhaar.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is in talks with various ministries, such as transport, rural development, Panchayati Raj, along with the Election Commission of India on the contours of the platform, which is at a preliminary stage of conceptualization and development right now.

The IT ministry will first approach departments that issue key documents such as driving licenses, ration cards, voter ID cards etc., while passports may come in the next phase, as per reports.

“We are talking to the departments currently to onboard them for the project,” says the government.

The changes will be made to all documents by the line ministries and will reflect in both physical and online formats.

“This means citizens will be asked to provide their consent if they wish to avail of such a facility, after which the platform will seek the consent of the concerned department. If, for instance, we get 10 ministries on board, citizens updating their addresses on Aadhaar will be asked if they wish to get it auto updated in the records of other ministries as well. Of the 10 ministries, if they want it to be updated in only two ministries, they can checkmark those ministries in the dropdown menu and the address will be updated with no breach of privacy,” according to the government.

This will be an Application Programming Interface (API)-driven platform and various ministries will develop their own APIs with MEITY's help for the respective departments to receive alerts when the changes are being made to Aadhaar.

APIs are software intermediaries that allow two applications to talk to each other. DigiLocker is a secure, cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents and certificates.