Indian State Issues Caste Certificates on Polygon as Part of e-Governance

The Maharashtra Government has issued 65,000 caste certificates on the Polygon network, setting a precedent for using Web3 for e-governance.

Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal applauded the initiative.

Kashif Raza, the founder of Bitinning, had taken to Twitter to point out the first instance of any government using an open-source network in India to avoid “forgery”. He noted, “This is the amalgamation of Web3 and e-governance.”

Meanwhile, the state is looking forward to scaling up the system after taking up the task of 65,000 caste certificates in its initial phase.

Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Officer Shubham Gupta explained in a blog post the government will use LegitDoc, a Polygon-based platform, for the purpose. And the region setting this precedent is a small district of 1 million people called Gadchiroli.

The case study, which is co-authored by Neil Martis, Co-founder at LegitDoc, stated, “Source of truth for citizen records will no longer be the dusty files racked in Government offices or the administrator governed data on cloud repositories. Instead, it’ll be the undeniable, cryptographically verifiable data proofs stored on-chain.”

We know that the caste system in India divides the society into various social groups. The purpose of these caste certificates is to allow access to certain privileges to genuine candidates belonging to a particular community.

The research paper looks to “instantly authenticate certificates with the help of uncensorable, publicly auditable data stored on-chain.”

Which, arguably, can curb forgeries and speed up authentication. Calling Web3 the next stage of the internet, the paper stated, “Today, we need open and neutral systems sources where the citizen data can be committed and verified.”

How does it work?

The paper highlighted that a verifier can use the decentralized application (dApp) hosted on the district administration website. The smart contract will verify the certificate by scanning the QR code. After which, “hash all certificate data entries to arrive at the final hash.”

After the validity of the final hash is established on the blockchain, the system becomes tamper-proof, the paper explained.

In addition to that, the administration expects an improvement in privacy and innovation going on a public blockchain.

Apart from that, it is worth noting that Polygon was an Indian startup that is now mostly based out of Dubai. Recently, Nailwal had stated that he is seeing crypto developers, investors, and entrepreneurs leaving India for more business-friendly destinations. Despite that, the Ethereum scaling platform is part of a few initiatives in India. Just yesterday, Polygon, announced an NFT auction to support healthcare in India through the Crypto Relief Fund. 

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