DigiLocker is a cloud-based document wallet that lets a citizen store, fetch and share government-issued certificates in digital form. Its beta went live in February 2015 and it was formally launched on 1 July 2015, the same day the Digital India programme itself was launched. UMANG - Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance - is a single mobile front end through which Central, State and local government services can be accessed; it was launched on 23 November 2017. Both are built and run by the National e-Governance Division under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Common Service Centres complete the picture at the last mile: they are physical access points in rural and semi-urban India, run by Village Level Entrepreneurs, through which citizens who lack devices or connectivity can still reach these digital services.

The two numbers describe very different things and are easy to misread. DigiLocker's 72.43 crore is a registration count built largely on the back of a few high-volume issuers - school and university results, driving licences, vehicle registration certificates and Aadhaar - while its transaction count of about 72.86 crore over three years shows that most accounts are used occasionally rather than daily. UMANG has far fewer registrations at 11.66 crore but roughly 798 crore transactions in the same period, because it fronts recurring services such as provident fund enquiries. Together they are the citizen-facing layer of what is now described as India Stack: identity at the base, payments in the middle, and verifiable documents and service delivery on top. The Common Service Centre network is the answer to the objection that always follows such figures - that a purely app-based state excludes those without smartphones or data.