An incident that transpired in Mumbai, has opened our eyes to the fact that maybe we in the media have not been clear on the finer details involved in carrying an officially approved soft copy of your driving license. A Twitter user by the name of Kalpak Shah (username son_of_KC) recently ran into trouble with the Mumbai Police after he tried to present them with a soft copy of his driving license, during a routine check by the authorities. It is not entirely clear whether Mr Shah showed a regular scan copy of the license or one stored in the M-parivahan app or Digilocker app. However, taking into account the police’ insistence, it might have just been a regular scanned copy of the DL.
Is a soft copy of the driving license valid or not? @MumbaiPolice
These guys were not lalowing it. pic.twitter.com/UzCJGAS6sr— Kalpak ‘KC’ Shah (@son_of_KC) December 16, 2018
For the sake of clarity, irrelevant to the incident mentioned above, Police are NOT obligated to accept any old soft copy of your driving license, this includes scan copies and pictures of your DL stored in your gallery.
You must be in possession of valid/original driving licence and produce for inspection when demanded by a policeman in uniform. (Sec 130 (1) MVA).
— Mumbai Police (@MumbaiPolice) December 16, 2018
The only way to use a soft-copy, legally, is uploading a copy of your Driving license to the mParivahan app and the Digilocker app. We’ve linked a step-by-step guide below for your reference. If police refuse to accept this, then you can take up the case or even show them a copy of the notification flashed by the government on 19th November 2018 which officially allows users to carry the copy of their driving license via the Digilocker app, and makes amends to the Motor Vehicle act to ensure that the people using this service are protected against harassment from officials.
Step by step guide on how to use DigiLocker: Here’s how to fetch digital copies of DL, vehicle RC
Naturally, this tweet started a storm on the social media platforms with many Mumbaikars asking for clarifications as to whether the Police are accepting digital copies or not. Prompting us to do this story and bring clarity to the situation. As for the aforementioned story, neither the Mumbai police nor the Twitter user in question has made any further clarifications as to whether the copy he was carrying was just a soft copy or whether it was in the legally mandated app. As more details emerge we will bring you more details!
