The government of Maharashtra will soon roll out the blockchain technology pilot projects in Pune and Konkan divisions to protect every bit of land transaction data against tampering and hacking.
According to information technology officials, blockchain technology is a decentralized digital ledger that will accumulate all transactions in a sequential order and notice any change within it.
SVR Srinivas, Principal Secretary (IT-Maharashtra), said, “It is a foolproof system. Once the data are entered into the system in cases of land transactions, it can be seen by all departments concerned. Any change made by anybody will be immediately recorded. This will improve security and make the process transparent.”
The department has prepared the roadmap of concept and it will be first trying out for land records in some of the selected urban areas of the Pune and Konkan revenue divisions. Thereafter, it will be rolled out to rest of the state.
At present, the data are entered manually, stored digitally and then transferred to the central server. Consequently, it’s customized for the cloud technology. But if anyone makes any alterations prior to transferring the data to the cloud, the modifications will be registered in the transactions.
However, this will not occur in the blockchain system, as per IT officials implementing the project involving start-ups in the next few months.
Additionally, the state government is weighing up to utilize this technology in various sectors such as financial inclusion, land records, supply-chain financing, goods and farm insurance and motor vehicle registration.
Srinivas said, “Land transaction is the first target, before rolling out the technology in the other sectors. We will follow the Andhra Pradesh model. The southern state has tied up with start-ups to implement blockchain technology.”
The system will preserve identical copies of data of records on multiple computer systems, which can be confirmed by a reviewer. However, the reviewer can only update the blockchain through a request to another official added from the revenue department.
Maharashtra is the second state after Andhra Pradesh to set up a blockchain and data cloud policy.