After the Central government had banned Bitcoins and all other virtual currencies, but acknowledged the importance of underlying block chain technology for economic growth, the Telangana government has lined up pilot projects to enhance security of digitised data relating to land records, vehicles registration and educational certificates.
The government will also organise a major international conference here in the first week of August with a view to gain expertise in creation of block chain ecosystem, comprising technology developers, talent and investors. It will be attended by about 2,500 participants and representatives of more than a hundred block chain technology companies, regulatory bodies and financial companies, a senior official said. A similar conference was organised by the Andhra Pradesh government at Vizag in October last year.
The block chain is proposed by the State government as a permitted technology to build trust in land transactions, vehicle ownership and authenticity of educational certificates. The government has conceptualised pilot projects in the three fields and is likely to take them up after getting inputs at the conference.
The usage of the technology was initially conceived only for land records to make the data tamper-proof, especially since the records of agricultural lands in over 10,823 villages were updated before the implementation of investment support programme for farmers at the rate of ₹ 4,000 an acre a season.
But, the same was sought to be extended to vehicles registration and educational certificates. The idea was to map the antecedents of vehicles during their entire life cycle right from the generation of numbers at the manufacturing stage. Similarly, the authenticity of educational certificates was also planned to guard against the circulation of fake certificates.
A request for tender to float the pilot project on block chain for land records has already been made, it was stated.
After the updation of land records, the government aimed at bringing transparency in registrations by creating a completely new system through which the records were properly maintained in a database. Whenever transactions for sale or purchase was done, the documents including registration papers will be updated instantly on the database.
It will provide a layer of security which will prevent manipulation and fraudulent practices. Even if the transactions were edited, the original data of lands will remain in the system.
As much as 2.21 crore acres of land was cleared by the government in the land records updation programme from September 15 to December 31.
