Strategy to adopt blockchain into govt systems released

What is the news?

The Ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) has released a national strategy on blockchain for adopting the technology in government systems, especially for e-governance services.

What are the key features of national strategy on blockchain?

It identifies 44 potential areas of using the technology and lays out the broad framework of how it can be utilized across different sectors.

i) A National Blockchain Framework (NBF) will be set up with three types of participants- i) confident user of technology (application developers), ii) provider or operator of technology (infrastructure and services, Blockchain as a service), iii) complete technology stack builder (IP creator).

ii) Under the framework, the National e-Governance division will handle the implementation of projects undertaken by various ministries and departments at central as well as state levels.

iii) A multi-institutional model has been suggested for structuring the NBF. It includes C-DAC for R&D, NIC and NICSI (National Informatics Centre Services Inc) for hosting the national-level blockchain infrastructure and offering blockchain as a service.

– It also lays out the overall vision and the development and implementation strategies for a National Blockchain Platform

iv) The sectors, where blockchain models have applications, have been identified as education, governance, finance & banking, healthcare, logistics, cybersecurity, media, legal, power sector, etc.

v) The ministry identified five areas of weakness in the technology– scalability, security, interoperability, data localisation and disposal of records.

vi) Key challenges to widespread adoption of blockchain tech are- adoption of the technology, regulatory compliance, identification of suitable use cases, finding the right data format, and awareness and skill set.

vii) The strategy seeks state governments to develop state-specific blockchain applications on the shared blockchain infrastructure.

What is Blockchain technology?

At its core and in its simplest form, Blockchain technology is just a record of transactions, where every transaction is public. For simplicity, you can consider it as a distributed ledger or like an Excel file, where info in each cell is linked to the previous cell. This makes it near impossible to manipulate the information, as any effort to change info in one of the cells can easily be found out.

For more info, kindly read these articles:

– Blockchain technology

– What is Blockchain technology?

– Factors affecting the growth of Blockchain in India

Source: This post is based on the article “Strategy to adopt blockchain into govt systems released” published in Business Standard on 4th Dec 2021.