Indian Gov’t Drafts Plan For National Blockchain Applications

India’s Minister of state for electronics and IT (MeitY) has announced that the government is drafting a national framework to expand the deployment of blockchain use cases.

“Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has identified Blockchain Technology as one of the important research areas having application potential in different domains such as Governance, Banking & Finance, Cyber Security and so on,” wrote Sanjay Dhotre.

He went on to explain the focus of the initiative include evolving an ecosystem around research and development (R&D) organizations, government departments and academia to foster blockchain technology; the design, development and pilot deployment of blockchain based applications in governance, banking & finance and cybersecurity; to conduct research to address the issues and challenges related to blockchain; evolving blockchain framework using open-source implementations; and to build the capacity in blockchain technology.

Dhotre added that the government is drafting an approach paper on the National Level Blockchain Framework. In addition, the Indian government has built the Distributed Centre of Excellence in Blockchain Technology, which develops and conducts research on blockchain technologies and their use cases. Run by government and research institutions, including the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, the project has piloted a blockchain system for property registration at Shamshabad District, Telangana State, developed proof-of-concept solutions for Cloud Security Assurance, C-KYC and trade finance.

Other projects include the authentication of academic certificates with a proof-of-existence framework, as well as vehicle life cycle and hotel registry management.

India has been embracing blockchain technology. Last month, India’s information technology services provider Tech Mahindra announced it was partnering with Netherlands-based blockchain application incubator Quantoz to provide secure digital payments. And Tata Consultancy Services has also rolled out a multi-brand consumer loyalty platform on R3’s enterprise blockchain Corda.