A driving licence downloaded from DigiLocker is a legally valid digital document under Indian law โ accepted by traffic police, RTO offices, banks, and most other authorities as equivalent to the physical card. However, like all DigiLocker PDFs, it carries a digital signature that shows as "Signature Validity Unknown" in most PDF viewers. This guide explains why that happens and how to instantly get a verified copy that shows a green tick everywhere.
Driving licences in DigiLocker are issued through the Parivahan Sewa portal (parivahan.gov.in) โ the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways' (MoRTH) digital platform, powered by the VAHAN/SARATHI database. When you access your driving licence through DigiLocker, the platform fetches your licence data from the VAHAN database and issues a digitally signed PDF. The digital signature is applied by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which manages the Parivahan infrastructure.
NIC is a licensed Certifying Authority under India's IT Act, 2000, and its signatures are legally valid. The certificate chain goes: CCA India (Root) โ NIC Sub-CA โ Document Signing Certificate.
PDF viewers like Adobe Acrobat, Chrome, and Edge use the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL) to verify digital signatures. India's NIC certificate is not part of this global trust list. The result: even a perfectly authentic DigiLocker driving licence shows a warning when opened on a computer. This is a display limitation, not a document defect. The licence is legal, valid, and unaltered โ the viewer simply cannot confirm it independently.
Under the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, and the MoRTH circular, a DigiLocker driving licence is accepted as valid proof in the following situations:
While the document is accepted legally even without a green tick, having a verified copy with a visible green tick prevents any on-the-spot confusion or unnecessary questioning.
Your Vehicle Registration Certificate (RC) downloaded from DigiLocker via Parivahan is also signed by NIC using the exact same certificate chain. The same "Signature Validity Unknown" error appears โ and the same VerifySign.in process fixes it identically. If you need a verified RC for insurance purposes, vehicle transfer, or police verification, simply follow the same steps above with your RC PDF. VerifySign.in will recognise it as a Parivahan/VAHAN document and verify it correctly.
Instant digital signature verification for any government PDF โ free, secure, no software needed.
Go to VerifySign.in โ