Maharashtra starts issuing caste certificates over blockchain

Maharashtra has started issuing caste certificates over the Polygon blockchain at two villages in Gadchiroli District — Etapalli and Bhamragad.

In partnership with LegitDoc, a blockchain-based application, the government is in the process of rolling out 65,000 caste certificates.

“More than 70 per cent of people in Gadchiroli are tribal, which means most of them require a caste certificate,” Neil Martis, co-founder of LegitDoc, said in a statement. 

The certificates will help the residents access government-funded benefits and subsidies.

Blockchain technology stores all records in a distributed database. Any data or record stored on it cannot be censored, tampered with or taken down. “What better than blockchain for implementing proof of record and authenticity systems,” Martis said.

The Gadchiroli administration aims to target 1.1 million economically challenged people through verifiable caste certificates.

In a blog post, Gadchiroli assistant collector Shubham Gupta said that while Maharashtra continues to issue digitally signed caste certificates via the ‘MahaOnline’ portal, the majority of the population still relies on physical documents. Verifying each document by looking for application numbers is “administrative intensive and there’s no easy mechanism for external parties to verify the data”, Gupta said.

Open verification system

The cryptographically signed system fetches information from MahaOnline and generates a unique QR code consisting of blockchain-proofs for every caste certificate.

“These QR-based certificates will be issued to the citizens via common service centres,” Gupta added. 

The open verification system available on the website will enable government departments, or any other third parties, to verify the authenticity of a certificate with the click of a button.

“In the case of verifying caste certificates, there are three parties involved: a document issuer, document holders (users) and document verifiers (authorities who verify documents). To facilitate this, all the three mentioned stakeholders have to come together, which requires infrastructure. This is already available on Polygon blockchain,” Martis said.