In his address to the International Blockchain Congress, Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog, the policy think-tank of the Indian Government, recently announced their intention of using blockchain to solve logjams in courts. He says,

“It’s [blockchain] powerful because it allows multiple parties to collaborate and come to consensus without any need of third party.”

The huge number of logjams in courts have made the situation impossible to deal with. As reported by Business Standard, there are almost 3 crore cases pending in all Indian courts including 42.5 lakh cases in high courts and 2.6 crores in the lower courts. The severity of the situation is evident by the fact that even solving 100 cases every hour would take 35 years for the nation to catch up.

Since two-thirds of all the pending cases are related to the registration of property and land, Niti Aayog is eager to find out a technological solution to “expedite registrations, mutations and enable a system of smart transactions that is free of corruption and middlemen.”

This is where Blockchain comes into the picture. It is a decentralized ledger technology which helps in recording transactions that are immutable and maintains full transparency. It has wide applications in travel, retail, supply chain management, finance, banking and many more industries.

Niti Aayog is specifically applying it to native problems in the nation like land registry, fertilizer subsidy distribution system, agricultural supply chain, rising supply of fraudulent drugs and maintenance of health records.

The think tank has already advanced towards solving the problem of land-registry by implementing a pilot in Chandigarh, to get proof-of-concept and to assess the potential of Blockchain to combat the inefficiencies of India’s land-registry system.

Apart from solving pressing problems of the nation, Amitabh also believes that blockchain can help improve the ease of doing business in India,

“While India jumped 42 places in the ease of doing business by the World Bank during last two years to move up to the 100th position, two indicators were still holding it down. In the enforcement of contracts, India is ranked 164 out of 190 and in the registration of property it is ranked 154 out of 190.”

Recently, the Andhra Pradesh Government also piloted blockchain technology for land records and transport to prevent tampering of land records and streamline the titles of the vehicles. No technology has been able to solve such key problems faced by India. By bringing ease of collaboration for businesses and facilitating greater transparency amongst citizens, it will be interesting to see the scale of the revolution ignited by blockchain.