Why India Needs a Native Blockchain Protocol

How can India benefit from Blockchain and the maximization of a native blockchain protocol?

The world’s largest democracy is marching towards digitization. Ever since Arun Jaitley, the Finance Minister of India spoke about blockchain technology in his budget speech in March 2018, the distributed ledger technology has found itself to be the centre of attention among industry leaders and governments alike.

Because of its immutability, blockchain has been attracting the attention of governments all over the world. These government departments see valuable opportunities through this technology. With the transparency and the authenticity that blockchain brings, it is getting easier for participants to keep a check on the validity of data that is being presented to them.

In India, it appears that the government, still figuring out the regulation around cryptocurrency, but is very interested in leveraging blockchain as a key technology component. In July 2018, the state of Rajasthan became the first in the country to have a fully developed blockchain-based fabric for managing electronic health records. This news came following the Kerala state government’s attempt at incorporating blockchain in the purchase and distribution network of vegetables, milk, and fish in the state.

There is definitely a strong interest in employing blockchain from the government. However, India is not alone in this journey. Several other countries have already started using blockchain in governance and citizen-facing applications.

Global vs Local

From a global standpoint, some initiatives that have truly stood out are as follows -

• The government of Dubai has set a rather bold example by attempting to put their entire governance on blockchain.
• The National Energy Commission in Chile is employing blockchain to bring accountability to the department.
• Estonia is using technology to create blockchain-based e-resident programmes.
• The United Kingdom is paying for welfare payment and student loans through the application of blockchain technology.
• Singapore’s finance department is using blockchain for interbank payments.

The one thing that stands out here is that most countries that have successfully implemented blockchain PoCs have small populations and the applications implemented here do not have as much of need for speed and scale.

That changes when it comes to India. With over 1.3 billion people, every service that will employ the blockchain will have high speed and scale requirements. Furthermore, India’s internet infrastructure, though vast, is not consistent across its geography. Majority of India’s mobile computing devices are also on the lower end of the spectrum.

This is changing as we speak, but if blockchain is to address India’s problem now, customized base chains are a necessity.

How can India benefit from blockchain?

The Indian government has been keen on exploring the potential of blockchain in its governance domain with strong support coming from the honourable Prime Minister himself. The NITI Aayog is backing the government’s interest at the adoption and advocacy of the technology.

For the sixth largest economy of the world, blockchain technology offers a several opportunities spread across many sectors. These pertain to areas of banking and finance, agriculture, education, employment, healthcare, voting, supply chain, retail, and even Goods and Services Tax (GST).

For instance, the Indian healthcare industry lacks a robust infrastructure to securely store large amounts of data. It is one of the largest sectors with revenues expected to touch 120 billion USD by 2020. An industry of this scale comes with huge data repositories hosting sensitive information about patients.

A distributed database gives us an opportunity to store all of the patients’ data securely and efficiently. With blockchain, all the stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem such as doctors, laboratories, hospitals can have real-time access to a patient’s data thus saving time on critical decision making and improving overall efficiencies of the whole system. The state government of Rajasthan, has started implementing such a project as a first in India.

Blockchain technology would also make it easier to implement multiple government initiatives efficiently from the beginning. For instance, The Ayushman Bharat initiative, announced by the government of India in 2018, aims to have a far-reaching impact on the Indian healthcare landscape by incorporating IT enablement, data analytics and management of fraud, among other things, in healthcare. It aims at providing efficient healthcare facilities to more than 10 crore rural and urban families. With assistance from the blockchain, the implementation of the biggest government-sponsored healthcare scheme in the world especially with respect to fraud management can be successfully achieved.

The same goes for the education sector where it is getting harder by the day to differentiate fake degrees from the real ones. In January 2018, Delhi police busted a fake degree racket operation which had sold more than 50,000 forged mark sheets of both school and university levels.

The state medical council of Maharashtra, in September 2018, pressed charges against 58 doctors for submitting fake degrees to obtain a practising license.

In scenarios like these, a digital certificate based on blockchain wherein the degrees are issued on a distributed ledger with a complete auditable trail visible to all stakeholders helps eliminate any fraud possibility.

Blockchain technology also helps us in cases of EVM (electronic voting machines) tampering and allows us to keep voter’s information and identity secured using cryptography.

Blockchain technology has also been employed to bring a change in cross-border payments (with faster transactions and minimal fees), supply chain management (with more transparency and enhanced security), and real estate (with shorter sales cycles and overhead costs).

It is also useful in the much complex Good and Service Tax calculation where the nodes in a supply chain can calculate the GST suitably making for an incorruptible system.

Today, blockchain technology is a key aspect of governance digitalization owing to the transparency that it brings into the system. Multiple citizen services (farmer subsidy, PM Aavaz Yojna, Ayushman Bharat) can be delivered efficiently to the beneficiaries because of the inherent benefits this technology brings with itself.

In ideal government machinery, blockchain technology eradicates the scope of corruption and provides for an efficient system while enabling ease of doing business.

The NITI Aayog is highly supportive of blockchain technology. As quoted by the CEO Mr Amitabh Kant, “NITI Aayog is applying Blockchain technology to pressing problems of India in areas such as land registry, health records, fertiliser subsidy distribution system, the menace of fraudulent drugs, agriculture supply chain. These disruptive projects will bring immense productive efficiency.”

Blockchain enabling an interoperable ecosystem

Blockchain technology will create a single shared ledger containing untampered data which everyone will be able to access. This would not only enable communication between different data repositories but also uniformity in their storage and security infrastructure.

Blockchain implementation will potentially establish a connection between all the domains of the government and will ensure efficiency, transparency, and improved governance.

A native, homegrown protocol — Eleven01

New use cases for blockchain are being developed every day. This is because most countries have access to a blockchain protocol that has been developed and bred in their native technologies (China has NEO; Korea Icon etc). But there has been no native blockchain protocol from India. Blockchain is a very key block on the digital backbone of any country, more so India, which has a large population and most of them have a digital presence, identity and information about their daily life and transactions. Coupled with Aadhar, India’s own social-security card, blockchain together is critical for any country. And it will need to ensure its highly secure and built and managed at a grass root level rather than relying on foreign systems and solution, which will always be a threat to security fabric.

With local requirements for data sovereignty, privacy and security in mind, The Eleven01 Foundation is developing India’s first ever home-grown blockchain protocol to enable the smooth progression and adoption of blockchain technology across the country.

A major domain where India can make use of blockchain is data storage and privacy issues. The country took a step towards having its own data privacy framework after Srikrishna Committee made several recommendations relating a data protection law. India has nearly 600 million internet users and it only makes sense for the country to have a framework that can protect their data from being exploited. Blockchain can potentially be of assistance here with its novel storage solutions changing the way data is stored wherein users get to decide who accesses their data.

A country as vast as India needs a protocol that has been developed by someone who understands the Indian customers and the Indian system of doing things — a protocol that accommodates the Indian diversity and establishes a country-wide blockchain ledger which can act as an accelerator in bringing the government initiatives closer to the people.

The Eleven01 Protocol

The Eleven01 protocol is a public and private blockchain to bring blockchain technologies to the next billion people. It is being built and developed with India focus and needs and provides an infrastructure to build fast, scalable, and flexible operations for various industry verticals and digitization of real-world assets.

The Eleven01 protocol will be developed with oracles which make it possible to transfer critical existing data onto blockchain and keeping the non-critical data off the chain while maintaining the integrity of blockchain thus resulting in improved speed of the system. Moreover, the Eleven01 protocol is a flexible protocol where the privacy settings can be altered and a consensus algorithm can be chosen depending on the type of use case being worked on.

Despite the crash in market valuation of cryptocurrencies, these are exciting times for blockchain technology and its applications as there are numerous advances being made to solve the inherent challenges of this new technology. With Eleven01, India is well positioned to harness the benefits of this transformative technology and become a leading player on a global stage.