Bengaluru-based LegitDoc is powering Maharashtra government’s initiative to issue 65,000 blockchain caste certificates in Gadchiroli district, which has about 70 per cent tribal population.
The caste certificates are produced on blockchain to deter forgery. Even though Maharashtra has an online platform to issue them, the majority holds caste certificates in physical form, becoming difficult to authenticate and verify.
Speaking to BusinessLine about the motivation to start this initiative, Shubham Gupta, an IAS officer working in Gadchiroli district, said, “I worked in Nashik earlier, and handled a case in which someone has falsified a caste certificate and gotten tribal land transferred to his name. So when I came here (Gadchiroli district) and noticed that the majority (70 per cent) population is scheduled tribe (ST), I wanted to do something preemptively.” The Gadchiroli district has a population of 1.1 million and has been declared aspirational district by NITI Aayog.
LegitDoc will cryptographically commit selective details of every caste certificate from the ‘MahaOnline’ portal on the polygon POS blockchain and generate a unique QR code. These QR codes will consist of blockchain-proofs embedded on the certificate. Anyone who wants to cross-check thecertificate (either printed or digital) can go to the verification portal on the district website and scan the QR code. The verification process takes less than ten seconds.
Talking about the project, Neil Matris said, “while multiple other governments have run private blockchain pilots for securing land records, this is the first instance of an e-governance initiative being run on a public blockchain network (Polygon).”
In the case of issuing caste certificates, there is a single issuer (like sub-division officer) and unknown number of participants such as document holders, verifiers etc. “So, it made sense to build applications on top of an existing public blockchain and make the data publicly auditable rather than relying on trusted private blockchain, which can be taken down any time by people maintaining them,” Matris added. A public blockchain is outside the control of any single authority, and holds the highest form of immutability and censorship resistance.
LegitDoc is the flagship product developed by Crossforge Solutions Private Limited. The company was founded by Matris, Francis Serrao, and Shesha Vishnu Prasad in 2018 as a part-time project, but has been operating as a full-fledged venture since 2021, with 6 full-time employees and one part-time staff.
LegitDoc’s monetisation model works like a SaaS product, wherein there are different price tiers that an enterprise can subscribe to. On an average, the base cost for issuing one document is less than $1 and document verification is free of cost.