West Bengal districts to use blockchain for issuing birth certificate

Divit Biyani, a month-old baby from Kolkata became the first one to receive a blockchain secured birth certificate in the state of West Bengal. The hi-tech birth certificate issued by the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) was received by Divit’s father, who owns a start-up named Super Procure. Now, two other Municipal Corporations in Bengal – Bankura and Durgapur, have also embraced the new technology to issue birth certificates, states media reports.

The municipal corporations of Bankura and Durgapur districts in West Bengal have partnered with the Netherlands-based company Lynked.World to build a blockchain-based platform for issuing legal documents such as birth certificates. Lynked.World is a platform built on blockchain technology to verify digital identity, education, and professional experience.

Blockchain technology will be used to manage governmental works like processing requests and verifying legal identities. With an aim to fuse Blockchain in government work, this action accelerates the route towards addressing the necessities of the residents as well as giving a legal and valid identity proof.

The blockchain for the birth certificate will work strictly on LYNK’s token that will provide a platform for the blockchain. The peer to peer network of this platform would allow its users for personal verification along with educational and professional digitally. It also provides users authority to have privacy on their vital data and information in a planned way. Not only this, users are allowed to control their data which cannot be shared in any way, except their physical presence at the respective location.

LynkedWorld’s Founder and CEO, Arun Kumar said, “Digitally verified identity data is the future of data management. Present-day systems are too cumbersome. The only way a government agency can ensure they’re dealing with actual citizens with rights to access services is to have them right in front of them, with ID in hand. Our platform removes this obstacle because it offers many layers of security to ensure the complete authenticity of digital identities, data, and documents. In a population-dense country like India, our system makes processes much simpler and faster for citizens and local governments, which in the end leads to savings on administration and processing fees.”

Blockchain could be the next big thing for a fast-growing economy like India. It is slowly and steadily using blockchain for real use cases - from using blockchain for monitoring the saplings to now for birth certificate issuance. Some countries have already executed the blockchain technology for different purposes. The use of blockchain in India is taking progressive steps in being the next big blockchain market in the world.

In the beginning, 150,000,000 tokens would be available as per the report. The sale of the token will start from 15 November 2018, which would continue till the 19th of February next year.  There’s also a report of providing 35 percent discount to the customer who would purchase their tokens before 7 December 2018.

The blockchains will have virtual blocks of information created with a person’s date of birth. It will be stored in a decentralised ledge and shared with a person when needed. Blockchain based certificate will be immune from cyber attacks due to the multi-level encryption the technology requires.

Why to use Blockchain?

Birth certificate is an important piece of document - from establishing citizenship, to proving existence, it gets used in a lot of ways in India. Also digitally verified identity data is the future of data management, as present-day systems are too cumbersome.

West Bengal, being a border state, suffers from illegal immigration from neighbouring country. For a small fee, today anyone can forge a birth certificate and use it to gain access to many services. The process for verifying authenticity is not simple either. 

Blockchain based certificates are therefore - 

* Immutable (information cannot be changed)

* Traceable (no one can change history, as all actions are logged there forever)

* Verifiable (in a public blockchain anyone can verify the authenticity of the document easily)