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India has released a five-year roadmap for adopting blockchain technology in the country. Called ‘National Blockchain Strategy,’ the roadmap focuses on promoting blockchain in various sectors of the economy and aims to foster closer cooperation between the private sector and the government. The 52-page document published recently by India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) is an updated version of one released earlier this year.
MeitY reveals that it’s working on a national blockchain framework.
The ministry lays out India’s ambition of building a national blockchain platform that it believes will immensely benefit 44 sectors of the economy. It also revealed that it’s working on a national blockchain framework, claiming that a “geographically distributed national level shared infrastructure with nodes spread across India” is necessary for the country to reap the benefits of blockchain technology fully. The central government intends to use this national infrastructure to provide blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS). The tech ministry identified 44 sectors it believes would greatly benefit from blockchain integration.
E-governance receives the most attention in the blockchain roadmap.
E-governance receives the most attention in the blockchain roadmap. Some of the applications span its national identity system known as Aadhaar, its eSign public key infrastructure, and its Digilocker citizen cloud hosting solution. With this focus on e-governance, the government is quite concerned with data security, privacy, and access. And while it goes into the feasibility of a public blockchain, it leans towards having a private ledger, otherwise known as a permissioned blockchain. It even lists the Hyperledger Fabric and the R3 Corda as some of the networks it has borrowed greatly from. The document outlines that the blockchain application will extend beyond e-governance, stating: “subsequently, the transition should be made to incorporate various use cases beyond e-governance, and the framework would be open for anyone to use.” The Indian central government is also preparing to regulate the crypto sector soon.
