Uttar Pradesh govt wants to use blockchain for securing land, revenue records

The Uttar Pradesh government is planning to implement blockchain technology to secure the state’s land registries and revenue records.

According to technology news portal Bitsonline, the country’s most populous state plans to migrate its entire land and revenue database to a blockchain-based record-keeping system.

The report said that government officials have been instructed to pursue the creation of such a system over the next six months.

The assigned government department will reportedly submit its first technical proposal in few days to the state’s IT ministry. To accelerate the process, local officials have sought help from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, the report added.

The initiative represents another effort by the state’s authorities to adopt newer technologies. 

Earlier this month, the Uttar Pradesh police department signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to boost its efficiency by using technology such as crime mapping analytics and predictive systems.

There have also been similar efforts in India to implement blockchain for securing land records.

Earlier this year, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said it had been working on a project to integrate blockchain technology into the land registry process in India as part of efforts to make it more reliable.  

The collaboration project, for which UNDP tied up with a couple of blockchain organisations, sought to build a land registry using blockchain technology for the city of Panchkula in Haryana.

The project used Ethereum blockchain with smart contracts - self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code.

On a national scale, the Union government’s policy think-tank Niti Aayog has been working on building the country’s largest blockchain network called IndiaChain with a view to reduce fraud and increase transparency in the system.