We recently reported that blockchain technology was being used in all aspects of life, and the government of the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh is only making this claim stronger by exploring the use of Blockchain technology in its land ownership system in order to make it more transparent. They have partnered with Swedish start up ChromaWay to build the blockchain solution. They have already piloted a blockchain project in Sweden, which focused on the process of buying and selling real-estate. J.A. Chowdary, the state’s special chief secretary and information technology advisor has said that this is a necessary move as there is great corruption in the existing system, with an estimated $700million paid in bribes to land registrars across India.

Speaking of the situation, he said; “The current system is rife with corruption. It is estimated that $700 million is being paid in bribes at land registrars across India. Fraud is rampant and disputes over titles often end up in court. Matters related to land and property make up about two-thirds of all civil cases in the country.”

The Technology:

The blockchain will be built on ChromaWay’s ‘Postchain’ platform, which is a combination of blockchain technology and mature database systems. It will allow users to interact with a web application on the front-end, whilst the data is being processed by the blockchain technology on the backend. Henrik Hjelte spoke of the start up project, and said that they believe that they have developed a registry that is secure, resilient, and transparent;

“Using a new architecture combing Blockchain with database, [we] have made a registry that is transparent, resilient and secure, but also has the traditional database features necessary for a registry.”

Long standing problem in India:

There are great hopes that this technology will considerably help with land registry fraud, which has long been an issue in India. It should be noted that this type of fraud is not relevant to just this one region. In fact, issues like these are prevalent in many different developing regions, such as Africa, where Blockchain’s transparent and immutable nature could be handy.

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