The Maharashtra government has used the Polygon network to issue 65,000 caste certificates, establishing a precedent for leveraging Web3 for e-governance. Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, praised the initiative. Bitinning’s founder, Kashif Raza, took to Twitter to highlight the first instance of any authority in India adopting an open-source network to combat “forgery.” “This is the fusion of Web3 with e-governance,” he said.
Meanwhile, after completing 65,000 caste certificates in the initial phase, the state is looking forward to scaling up the system. Shubham Gupta of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) explained in a blog post that the government will employ LegitDoc, a Polygon-based platform, for this purpose. Gadchiroli, a small district of one million inhabitants, is the location that is establishing the trend.
“The dusty papers stored in Government offices or the administrator managed data in cloud repositories will no longer be the source of truth for citizen records,” according to the case study, which was co-authored by Neil Martis, Co-founder of LegitDoc. Instead, it’ll be the on-chain data proofs that are incontrovertible and cryptographically provable.
A verifier can use the decentralised application (dApp) housed on the district administration website, according to the report. The smart contract will scan the QR code to verify the certificate. According to the paper, the mechanism becomes tamper-proof after the final hash’s authenticity is proven on the blockchain, according to the paper. Furthermore, the administration anticipates an increase in privacy and innovation as a result of using a public blockchain.
Apart from that, it’s worth noting that Polygon was founded in India and is currently mostly based in Dubai. Nailwal has remarked that he is seeing crypto engineers, investors, and entrepreneurs fleeing India in search of more business-friendly locales. Despite this, the Ethereum scaling platform is being used in a few Indian projects. Polygon just announced an NFT auction to benefit India’s healthcare through the Crypto Relief Fund.
Will other state governments follow Maharashtra’s footsteps? Let us see.
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