Technology for Caste Certificates

There was a serious problem at hand. The issue was to pre-emptively prevent duplicates and forgery in caste certificates, thereby, disallowing the miscreants and anti-social elements from misusing the caste certificates to avail any kind of benefits being provided by the government or any other organisation, apart from stricter safeguards on land-related transactions.

The target group for the project was primarily the 70 per cent Scheduled Tribe population (including a large number of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) such as Madia, Gond, etc.) in the two blocks of Etapalli and Bhamragad in Gadchiroli District of Maharashtra, which requires the caste certificate as an identification document to avail benefits of schemes designed for the Scheduled Tribes.

Etapalli Sub-Division began a path-breaking initiative of issuing caste certificates to its citizens which are cryptographically anchored on polygon POS blockchain which enables entities to instantly authenticate certificates with the help of uncensorable, publicly auditable data stored on-chain (on public blockchain).

The current blockchain implementation in Etapalli supports even printed certificates along with digital certificates. The printed form of blockchain certificates can also be verified using this new system with the help of a simple QR code.

As the first step, the project is being rolled out in the Etapalli Sub-division which comprises the villages of Etapalli and Bhamragad. Upon complete rollout, the system will prevent miscreants and anti-social elements from misusing the caste certificates to avail any kind of benefits being provided by the government to its citizens located in the sub-division of Etapalli. Within two months, around 65,000 caste certificates in Etapalli will be run through the blockchain system, a figure which will increase gradually.

Currently, the state issues digitally signed caste certificates to its citizens via the ‘MahaOnline’ portal. However, the majority of the population holds caste certificates in paper printouts for convenience, a physical document that is challenging to authenticate and verify, via signatures on printed papers. While the departments which have issued the caste certificates can internally track these documents with the help of the application numbers on them - such a process is administrative intensive and there’s no easy mechanism for external parties to verify the data.

The proposed blockchain system cryptographically commits selective details of every caste certificate fetched from the ‘MahaOnline’ portal on the polygon POS blockchain and generates a unique QR code consisting of blockchain-proofs which are embedded on each caste certificate. These certificates will be issued to the citizens via common service centres (CSC), which are already functional across all villages. Subsequently, the open verification system available on the government website will enable government departments, or any other third parties, to verify the authenticity of a certificate with the click of a button.

The blockchain system consists of an Issuance DApp (DApps are decentralized applications built on top of public blockchains) and a Verification DApp.

The verification DApp is hosted on the Gadchiroli district administration website. It points directly to the blockchain smart contract. Any interested verifier with the caste certificate (either printed or digital) can head over to the verification portal on the district website and scan the QR code. The process of verification is done within a matter of 10 seconds!

Any tampering done by an external party to the QR code data will be immediately detected during verification since this will cause drastic changes to the final hash of the certificate data. Moreover, even if a malicious actor creates a fake certificate but pastes a valid QR code on it, the verifier will be easily able to detect the forgery since there will be a mismatch between the data shown on the verification portal and the forged certificate being verified. This blockchain implementation is a huge leapfrog compared to the existing system.

The blockchain implementation in the case of caste certificates in the Etapalli sub-division in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra is a huge leapfrog compared to the existing system. The impact of the project is multi-fold with a significant influence on multiple aspects of governance. Some of the improvements achieved through the blockchain initiative are as follows:

Open verification and reduction in fraud: Any third party – such as employers, educational institutions, government agencies, judicial bodies, etc. can now verify the authenticity of citizen caste certificates within 10 seconds, with just a click of a button! The newfound ability to easily verify caste certificates will drastically reduce fraudulent benefit/incentive claims.

Improvements in privacy: If an open verification system were to be implemented using traditional digital query-based methods, it would require exposing citizen data on the internet via secure APIs. However, in the current implementation, hashes of citizen data, that are computationally impossible to reverse engineer, are stored on the blockchain and exposed to the internet for verification purposes- a major improvement in citizen data privacy.

Deplatformation Resistance: The blockchain implementation ensures the immunity of the citizens from any kind of deplatformation in the future. In an unlikely scenario of a tyrannical government or officers wanting to change or erase a citizen’s caste records for political reasons, the citizens can still rightfully prove the authenticity of their records using the unfalsifiable data stored on-chain.

Open Innovation: The blockchain smart contract on which the cryptographic proofs of the caste certificates are stored acts as an open API. Any external actors can now use the blockchain data in a ‘permissionless’ way and build innovative systems on top.

Post the two-month exercise of passing all the 65,000 certificates through the blockchain system, with a gradual increase up to 85,000 over the next few months, transparent e-governance can be made viable in Etapalli and Bhamragad through the help of the right interventions following this project, such as enabling rightful access to government schemes based on their historical backwardness.

What has been initiated in this remote District of the country under the inspired leadership of this young IAS officer, Shubham Gupta is a remarkable example of Nexis of Good. The model can be replicable. Many state governments such as Chattisgarh and Jharkhand are already in talks to scale it up at the state level.

Views expressed are personal