As blockchain technology takes a new step towards adoption in India, the CBSE, in collaboration with the Centre of Blockchain Technology of National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), has now come up with a solution using a blockchain technology dubbed by the name as “Academic Blockchain Documents” to make sure the recording and storing of academic documents of students securely and in a tamper-proof manner.
As per the report of the CBSE officials, the technology will make sure that the academic documents can be accessed over the web by several educational institutes for the verification at the time of admission for the higher studies, verification by companies for job offers, counselling or by banks at the time of disbursing loans, in a trusted and verifiable manner.
How Will the do Process Work?
As of now, CBSE provides digitally Signed Certificates of classes 10 and 12 from 2019 to 2021. It claims to be pushing the issuance of these digital certificates of previous years up to 1975 in the coming months.
As per the report by the CBSE officials and executives, “Upon issuance of new certificates by CBSE, the digitally signed certificates will be sent to the Blockchain-based system creating an additional secure link. Digitisation of legacy records of classes 10 and 12 from 1975 onwards is in progress and will be appended to the repository as soon as completed. Thereafter, this repository is set to become one of the largest digital academic repositories in the world.”
“Blockchain implementation has been done by CBSE. Earlier we introduced Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) for affiliation systems. Here, the data is linked and stored with cryptographic security so that it is immutable and traceable,” CBSE Director of Information and Technology Antriksh Johri told news agency ANI. “This will serve as a single source truthful data for verification for students going for higher education or employment.”
In the current scenario, the certificate chain is being managed by the NIC at its data centres in Jaipur, Bangalore and Pune.
Blockchain Sees Adoption in Govt Circles
Blockchain is a new age innovative technology that first hogged the limelight after Bitcoin gained traction. The technology is now being used by various sectors such as cyber security, healthcare, supply chain and banking sector. The central government, which has been sceptical about cryptocurrency, has been showing interest in adopting blockchain technology.
For example, remote voting might be a reality in the year 2024 in the coming Indian general elections, as claimed by Sunil Arora, Chief Election Commissioner, in the month of March 2021. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is working with the IIT Madras for using blockchain technology to enable application based e-voting to make the process more easy and convenient by the time of the Lok Sabha elections.
Moreover, in the month of August 2021, the Indian Stock Market Regulator SEBI had said its depositors to use blockchain technology to monitor and record the security created as well as monitors covenants of non-convertible securities. The system will capture the process of creation of security, privacy, and continuous monitoring of covenants by debentures trustees, the credit rating of the non-convertible securities by credit rating agencies (CRA).
Some of the states like Tamil Naidu, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana have been using Blockchain technology to issue the Coronavirus test certificates, which aims to streamline the government services and set up real-time document management systems to make sure transparency.
In the month of July, it was also reported that the centre is eyeing to build a platform that is based on the blockchain that would help the government departments, banks, PSUs and investors to verify the authenticity of the information submitted by the startups. The government also later supported that blockchain added additional security and privacy layer to the certificates to verify the status of the documents by startups, for accessing different opportunities by procurement entities, investors, stakeholders and government departments.