Digi Locker and NAD are initiatives of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Ministry of Education (MoE) respectively. The concept of National Academic Depository (NAD) is born out of an initiative by MoE to provide a 24X7 online depository to Academic institutions to store and publish their academic awards. The digital depository not only ensures easy access to and retrieval of an academic award but also validates and guarantees its authenticity and safe storage.
Digi Locker is a provider of NAD services and aims at ‘Digital Empowerment’ of citizen by providing access to authentic digital documents to citizen’s digital document wallet. The issued documents in Digi Locker system are deemed to be at par with original physical documents as per Rule 9A of the Information Technology (Preservation and Retention of Information by Intermediaries providing Digital Locker facilities) Rules, 2016.
Maintaining academic awards in an electronic depository would provide benefit to educational institutions, students and employers by enabling online access of academic awards which will eliminate the need for persons to approach educational institutions for obtaining transcripts of such awards for verification. It would also eliminate fraudulent practices such as forging of awards, by facilitating online verification thereof and maintains the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the award.
It aspires to make the vision of Digital Academic awards for every Indian a reality.