In January 2021, the Ministry of Electronics and Info Know-how (MeitY), Authorities of India, printed a draft of the Nationwide Technique on Blockchain, which mentions 17 totally different makes use of of nationwide significance for blockchain expertise. It’s attention-grabbing to see that slowly, however steadily, the Authorities is specializing in the enterprise worth of this straightforward but highly effective expertise, which has been a lot mentioned over the previous few years.
Blockchain isn’t a brand new idea; the concept of utilizing hash chains to safe items of information, or the idea of cryptographically secured distributed consensus has been round for some a long time. Nonetheless, Bitcoin, the broadly debated cryptocurrency, was accountable for popularising blockchain by demonstrating its energy in a decentralised set-up. Later, enterprises started discovering numerous thrilling enterprise makes use of for this expertise.
Consequently, we moved from Blockchain 1.0, the permission-less mannequin utilized in Bitcoin design, to Blockchain 3.0, which mixes the facility of blockchain with automated code execution, generally known as sensible contracts.
So, what can blockchains ship? Assume that you simply run a grocery store, and also you wish to purchase 50 kg of onions from a distributor. The distributor claims that farmers should not promoting beneath ₹50 a kg, resulting in a excessive wholesale worth, plus the excessive value of transport. How do you validate these claims?
The naive answer is to arrange a digital dashboard the place everybody — the distributors, wholesalers, farmers, transport corporations, and so forth — will hold updating their service prices. However then, who will host and keep the dashboard? The distributors, wholesalers, or the transport corporations can’t as a result of they’re a part of the enterprise, and would possibly manipulate the platform to learn them. For those who purchase the service from a 3rd social gathering, there might be a further value for it; for instance, think about e-commerce marketplaces equivalent to Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart. Everybody tries to make a revenue as intermediaries.
Blockchain solves this downside. The stakeholders, such because the farmers, wholesalers, distributors, logistics corporations and shopkeepers, keep their very own information individually in a decentralised set-up. A decentralised computation platform interconnects them whereas stopping tampering of the saved information and sustaining particular person information safety. Additional, it helps monitoring the provenance of knowledge at each step when the data is registered to the system. Moreover, as soon as a bit of knowledge is written, it can’t be erased or denied afterward. Due to this fact, everybody can see and confirm “who has finished what”. Thus, blockchain brings transparency in a multi-organisation enterprise set-up, which considerably reduces fraudulent actions and corruption.
Past commerce
As for the purposes of nationwide curiosity talked about within the MeitY draft doc, these embrace switch of land data, digital certificates administration, pharmaceutical provide chain, identification administration, energy distribution, responsibility funds, e-voting, public service supply, chit fund administration, and microfinance for self-help teams.
Blockchain may also assist in scientific analysis. On the Programs and Cell Analysis Lab (SMRL) of the Division of Pc Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, we concentrate on supporting interoperability amongst a number of blockchain networks like Hyperledger, Corda, Ripple, Quorum, OpenChain and Steller, that are being adopted by enterprises globally. We’re additionally engaged on creating blockchain-based purposes in our lab. One in all our not too long ago accepted papers on the 2021 IEEE Worldwide Convention on Pc Communications talks concerning the design and prototype implementation of a multi-cloud federated structure the place small and medium cloud service suppliers can use a blockchain-based open market to commerce cloud assets.
Threat of fraud
All these purposes contain a number of organisations with conflicting enterprise pursuits, thus having a major threat of fraud, which is perhaps difficult to trace. Blockchain can deliver worth to such purposes because the actions of people turn into noticeable, tractable, and provable.
Alongside these traces, Niti Aayog printed a white paper, in January 2020, titled ‘Blockchain: The India Technique In the direction of Enabling Ease of Enterprise, Ease of Dwelling, and Ease of Governance’. Whereas the paper explains why blockchain is usually a stellar expertise for the making of Digital India, it additionally highlights the actions of Niti Aayog in the direction of proof of idea implementation of 4 blockchain-based companies: ‘Monitor and hint’ of medicine in pharma provide chains; declare verification and approval within the disbursement of fertiliser subsidy; verification of college certificates; and switch of land data.
With such actions, we are able to certainly think about a corruption-free India within the close to future. Know-how could have the facility to pressure individuals to make the suitable determination, one which advantages society. Whereas that’s the “good” facet, the “unhealthy” is the doubtless hurdles posed to the adoption of a brand new expertise in a various nation like India. The “ugly” bit is moderately severe — blockchain works with the principal assumption that almost all of its contributors are non-malicious. It would fail if greater than 50 per cent of contributors behave fraudulently. Due to this fact, even blockchain will be unable to avoid wasting us except the “good” prevails over the “evil”. We as residents should concentrate on that.
The author is an Assistant Professor within the Division of Pc Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur
