Chennai: Digital depository for school and college certificates, announced in the Union Budget, would act as a one-stop shop for storing, retrieving and verifying all educational certificates whenever necessary.
A top scientist with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) told Express that digital libraries would be set up on a pilot basis, which would be soon expanded into a national library.
Experts believed that the digital depository launched as part of the Centre’s Digital India would eliminate the necessity for physically storing education certificates and be a solution to the increasing fake educational certificate scams across various states.
“DeitY would be providing technical assistance to this initiative to be primarily taken by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD)”, the scientist working in the e-governance group of DeitY told Express.
The scientist added, “At present we are planning to set up a digital library on a pilot basis, which we had earlier developed for research purpose and this would be expanded later.
The MHRD had begun collecting necessary data and at subsequent meetings with the officials they would decide the location for the pilot scheme. “This would save a lot of time, particularly when someone lost their certificates and tried to get a duplicate copy from the authorities”, said M Saravanan, an IT employee. Saravanan had lost all his original certificates on his way to Chennai to attend an interview and was made to run from pillar to post at the TN Directorate of Government Examinations Headquarters, Chennai.
Sources from the School Education department said that this might be linked with the Digital Locker facility introduced earlier to ensure safe online storage and easy access of documents anytime.
“But, this portable locker linked the students’ certificates with their respective personal Aadhaar card identity numbers and despite special camps, several students were left out and yet to receive their cards,” sources added.