DigiLocker and E-Governance: How Modi Digitised Government Services

Alongside UPI and Aadhaar, covered in detail in our earlier articles on Modi’s digital governance legacy, a broader set of e-governance platforms have reshaped how Indians access official documents and government services. This article focuses specifically on DigiLocker and the UMANG app, two of the most widely used platforms in this ecosystem.

What DigiLocker Does

DigiLocker functions as a digital document wallet, letting citizens store and access official documents, including educational certificates, vehicle registration papers, and identity documents, in a government-verified digital format that carries the same legal validity as the original physical document under India’s IT Act, according to ForumIAS’s explainer on India’s digital governance ecosystem. This eliminates the need to carry or photocopy physical documents for many routine verification purposes, from college admissions to airport security checks that now accept DigiLocker-stored identity documents directly.

The UMANG Super-App

Complementing DigiLocker, the UMANG app, standing for Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance, functions as a single access point for a very large number of government services that would otherwise each require their own separate application or in-person visit. According to DD News’s coverage marking a milestone in India’s e-governance journey, UMANG has crossed 8 crore users, offering more than 2,300 government services across 23 different languages, a scale of service consolidation onto a single platform that reflects a deliberate strategy of reducing the number of separate touchpoints citizens need to navigate to access different government services.

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The Broader Digital Governance Ecosystem

These platforms sit within a considerably wider digital governance architecture that has expanded significantly during this period, encompassing everything from digital land records to online grievance redressal systems, according to ForumIAS’s broader survey of India’s e-governance initiatives, a cumulative infrastructure investment that, taken together with UPI and Aadhaar covered elsewhere in this series, represents one of the more comprehensive national digital government service transformations attempted anywhere in the world over this specific decade.

The Access Question That Applies Across This Ecosystem

As with the other digital governance platforms covered in this series, DigiLocker and UMANG’s benefits depend on citizens having reliable smartphone access, functional internet connectivity, and basic digital literacy, meaning the same digital exclusion concerns raised in our earlier articles on UPI and Aadhaar apply here as well, with citizens lacking these prerequisites, disproportionately elderly, rural, or economically disadvantaged populations, unable to access the same convenience and efficiency gains these platforms offer to digitally connected users.

How This Fits Into International Comparisons

India’s e-governance platforms have drawn international attention alongside its payments infrastructure, with the underlying design philosophy, building interoperable, government-verified digital services accessible through simple mobile interfaces, often cited in international digital governance comparisons as a distinctive approach compared to how e-governance has developed in many other large countries, where services have more often remained fragmented across separate department-specific portals rather than consolidated onto shared platforms like UMANG.

The Ongoing Expansion

This digital governance ecosystem has continued expanding rather than remaining static since its initial platforms launched, with new services and document types regularly added to both DigiLocker and UMANG’s coverage, according to ongoing tracking of the platforms’ growth, a pattern of continuous incremental expansion consistent with how the broader Digital India programme covered in our earlier UPI article has developed across this decade generally.

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The Platform’s Growing Scale

DigiLocker’s own growth trajectory has been substantial since its launch. According to figures cited by India’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations as part of an “11 Years of Digital India” review, reported by ANI News, DigiLocker had by mid-2026 grown to serve over 70 crore registered users and had come to store more than 850 crore, roughly 8.5 billion, individual digital documents, a scale that places it among the largest digital document repositories operated by any single government anywhere in the world. This growth reflects the platform’s progressive integration with an expanding number of document-issuing authorities, from university examination boards issuing digital degree certificates to state transport departments issuing digital vehicle registration papers, each additional issuer integration adding a new category of document that citizens can access through the single unified platform rather than needing separate physical or digital copies from each individual issuing body.

This scale of adoption also reflects growing acceptance of digital documents as functionally equivalent to physical ones in everyday situations that once required paper copies, from airport security checks to college admission verification, a shift in institutional practice that took several years of building trust in the platform’s verification mechanisms before becoming as routine as it has now become across much of urban India specifically.

Bottom Line

DigiLocker and UMANG together represent a substantial e-governance consolidation effort, with UMANG alone reaching 8 crore users offering over 2,300 services in 23 languages, part of a broader digital governance ecosystem that has genuinely simplified access to government services and documents for digitally connected citizens, even as the same digital exclusion concerns documented elsewhere in this series apply to the population still lacking reliable smartphone and internet access.

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Abhyudaya Verma