This survey presents a brief discussion of different aspects of digital image watermarking. Included in the present discussion are these general concepts: major characteristics of digital watermark, novel and recent applications of watermarking, different kinds of watermarking techniques and common watermark embedding and extraction process. In addition, recent state-of-art watermarking techniques, potential issues and available solutions are discussed in brief. Further, the performance summary of the various state-of-art watermarking techniques is presented in tabular format. This survey contribution will be useful for the researchers to implement efficient watermarking techniques for secure e-governance applications.