Niti Aayog plans paper on blockchain technology for land, health records

Niti Aayog, the government’s premier think tank, is looking to bring out a discussion paper on the prospective use of blockchain technology in areas such as land records and electronic health records.

The discussion paper, likely to be brought out within a month, will have extensive reports on the proof of concepts (PoC) studies carried out to check if land records can be synced with registration offices for better governance and whether electronic health records can be made more transparent.

Blockchain is an infrastructure where a distributed digital ledger is maintained by a network of computers or nodes. This means information of a financial or nonfinancial transaction is shared with a decentralised network and validated by the entire network. Therefore, a blockchain framework, not being managed centrally, effectively reduces the chances of data manipulation and leaves lesser scope for a hacker to corrupt one system.

“Where we lag is enforcement of contracts and registration of land in the ease of doing business index. Seventy per cent of our district civil cases are related to land disputes. This is due to inefficient linkage between the registration system and record of rights system. Niti will do two-three PoCs utilising blockchain technology to make this process simpler by putting the transaction online and making land transactions transparent and secure,” said Aalekh Sharan, officer on special duty to CEO, Niti Aayog.

“This will have the effect of converting a record of transactions into the record of rights. We will measure the results of those PoCs to learn from them and make future implementation even better,” he added.