Hi Everyone,
I attended a lecture at Indian Merchants Chambers yesterday on the new government rule called MCA-21. The new rule provides that all document sumbitted to the Ministry of Company Affaires now needs to be given in digital form only. They will no longer accept physical documents. Further, each of these documents will have to have a digital signature of the persons who were earlier required to sign the physical documents.
This is the first step to moving all governement documents to digital form and save huge time and cost of users now wasted in standing in line and submitting documents to the government. The next will be Tax authorities, followed by Excise and Customs. Land Records are expected to be next thereafter.
There are 7 companies in India who are authorised to issue digital certificates recorgnised under the Information Technology Act. TCS is one who was present at the seminar and demonstrated the use of the digital certificates. For those who have not used them, these are stored by TCS on USB Tokens, which look like USB Pen drives but are read-only 32KB drives with processors built in. You are supposed to insert in the token in the UCB port and then ask the Online-Form to pick up the digital certificate from the token and add it to the document to submit to the government.
These certificates are based on 128 bit encryption and PKI.
TCS assured me that it is designed to work both on Linux and Mac in addition to Windows and that they are including the relevant drivers with the token. However, the additional software tools they are providing for automating digital signatures on other documents will work only on Windows. I would like to know if any of you have used the Digital Siganture / Digital Certificates that is being issued under MCA-21 and can confirm that it works properly on Linux.
The other providers of Digital Certificates includes MTNL. While TCS is charging Rs. 2075 for a 1 year valid certificate, MTNL is charging Rs. 350. They are sending it to you on email !! Ofcourse, they are doing this only at Malabar Hill Exchange and you have to go personally to their office and they will verify that you are the person whose name is on the form and your address, photo, etc.
I do not know much on Digital Certificates. However with this becoming a major part of commercial and business transactions, I hope what the government is doing does not work only on Windows. If necessary, we (or perhaps FSF) will need to initiate a dialog with the government.
In the next year, it is estimated that just government requirment will result in over 1 million digital certificates being issued. I think the actual figure will be close to 5 million as more government depatments like Income Tax, Sales Tax, Excise and Customs departments move to "digital documents only" mode. (Just imagine - if every shop keeper needs to file his sales tax returns online and needs a digital certificate to be able to upload the return to the government). It would be very important for us to ensure that Linux gets supported in the process.
Regards Saswata