Hyderabad becomes first 'Blockchain District' in India: Courtesy, Tech Mahindra and state govt

To promote blockchain growth in India, the Telangana State Information Technology, Electronics and Communication and Tech Mahindra have come together to launch India's first Blockchain district in Hyderabad.

Both the parties signed a MoU on Friday.

The district will be the centre of excellence developing emerging technology with innovative infrastructure. It will be a global talent hub solving big scale global problems and providing technical assistance to all the incubators, said CP Gurbani, CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra.

It is also a huge step in reskilling and right skilling the workforce of the future, he added.  The Telangana govt will provide regulatory and policy support to promote Blockchain growth in India.

Of late, many states in the country have shown interest towards blockchain technology. States such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka have working on the blockchain project to safeguard their respective and voluminous revenue records.

Earlier in July, the UP government had announced its plan to use blockchain tech for ensuring data security of land and revenue records.

The govt has directed officials to build blockchain infra within next six months. Along with data security of land and revenue records, it will help in registration and verification, prevention from forgery and tempering, UP Chief Secretary Anup Chandra Pandey was quoted as saying by BS report.

UP govt has requested Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) to give suggestions for making the government’s startup policy more focused and productive.

More than 150 million of Uttar Pradesh population is dependent on agriculture and pastoral land for livelihood. The technology would weed out manipulation, forgery and cheating.

A distributed ledger is a collection of records where every person who accesses it also has a copy. But participants have to agree to make a change in the database.

Meanwhile, the government think-tank NITI Aayog along with other stakeholders have been working for the past few months on the application of blockchain technology for various aspects of governance.

The government is also piloting trials to award degrees under NITI Aayog. The plan is to begin issuing digital certificates on the blockchain (IndiaChain) from the 2019 batch onwards. The think tank also plans running blockchain-based pilots on electronic health records and land records, amongst others.