Even as the controversies over the leakage of Aadhaar data linger, the government has taken a major initiative to develop a robust home-grown blockchain-based digital platform which could be used for a variety of digital initiatives, including providing an access lock to fraudulent use of unique identity data.

The government recently awarded a ₹33.4-crore project to the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) to conceptualise and build the platform and the software that can be used by Central and State government departments for transparent e-Governance initiatives.

The project will be executed by a team led by Manindra Agrawal, a professor of computer science and engineering at IITK. As per the mandate given to the experts, the scientists would conceptualise and build the platform in two years and hand it over to a firm, wholly-owned by IITK.

Over the next three years, the firm will identify the possible areas of applications. Some potential areas of application thought of are land record and registry management, driving licence and record, identity management as well as insider threat management in the context of cyber security of any IT infrastructure. The IITK team will be helped in creating the blockchain platform by would be their counterparts in IIT Madras.

Wide-ranging applications

The platform will be designed in such a manner that it can be used to meet a wide range of digital technology initiatives of the government, ranging from providing an access lock on Aadhaar card information to managing digital land records, said Agrawal, who is also the deputy director of IITK.

Agrawal, who, along with his students Neeraj Katyal and Nitin Saxena, discovered a quicker way to test whether a number is a prime number (called AKS primality test) in 2002, is one of the leading experts in cryptology and, thus, by far the best in the country to take up the challenge.

“Our design has to be general enough to cater to the diverse requirements of the government. Therein lies the challenge,” said Agrawal. “For example, in the case of Aadhaar, only the person to whom the Aadhaar number belongs should be able to verify the Aadhaar access details, nobody else. On the other hand, everybody should be able to access land records to verify who holds what land.”

Blockchain advantage

Blockchain technology provides an immutable recording mechanism for events, transactions, and data – which due to use of strong cryptographic hash functions, and hash-based chaining of blocks of data -- cannot be tampered with even by users with administrative privilege.

“Blockchain platform can be viewed as a public ledger, which cannot be tampered with. When one makes an entry into the ledger, nobody can change or remove that entry, not even the person who has made that entry. So once a record goes in there, it becomes tamper-proof forever. That is its strength,” said Agrawal.

Other collaborators of Agrawal in the project are Sandeep Saxena, IITK professor who will handle the software design, and Shweta Agrawal, a cyber security expert from IIT Madras and their research students.

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