The Indian government uses blockchain networks to store documents from various departments and states. Nearly 8 million documents were digitized.
India’s National Informatics Center (NIC), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), launched a website to track the country’s progress on different blockchain initiatives.
Specifically, the portal tracks the number of documents posted on blockchain networks. As of March 3, approximately ~7.94 million documents were digitized, coming from six states and three government departments: the Central Board of Secondary Education, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, and the Ministry of Justice.
Documents are hosted on the Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchains. Five blockchain products were deployed on them, each used to host a specific type of document. The digitization process includes:
- educational certificates;
- documents related to the judicial system;
- documents confirming ownership of real estate;
- logistical documents related to medicine supply chains.
Moreover, several tools are presented to verify data hosted on blockchain networks. At the moment, all of them apply to the state of Karnataka but will cover all regions of the country in the future.
In addition, Indian authorities are working on launching blockchain products to host data on land records, blood banks, goods and services tax refunds, and the public distribution system. With the introduction of blockchain technology, the Indian government intends to address the problem of malicious individuals using fake documents.
Back in 2022, it was reported that the police department of the Indian state of Goa planned to abandon the paper document flow, completely digitizing it and transferring it to the blockchain network. In the same year, it became known that India’s Ministry of Textiles, Commerce, and Industry intended to introduce a blockchain-based system for tracking cotton logistics to ensure transparency of export shipments of goods.
