700,000 Indian land records put onchain: the elimination of friction continues

The biggest use case for public blockchains may be the facilitation of monetary transactions without intermediaries and with low fees but it is not the only use case.

People quite frankly underestimate what value comes with moving away from centralized database systems to distributed alternatives.

We are going to witness an extensive use of blockchains and multiple associated products and services across various real world sectors in varying forms.

The understanding of what is coming to many is very narrow, where most people are thinking about the replacement of the banking system and the close-tied investment scene, what's actually going to take place is the vast improvement of the complex and rigid business sector and total optimization of access to information and scaling of costs associated with the reliance on bad and faked data.

Blockchain is effectively going to cut across a vast array of digital and real world sectors beyond finance, improving the lives of businesses, employers, employees and consumers at large.

All of this is made possible because public blockchains are open-source permissionless tech and smart contracts will enable cost-saving automation of processes that would traditionally cost several man hours and money.

Fighting Crime and Rigidity with Blockchain

Contrary to the lies the government has tried to promote over the years that blockchain and crypto is crime central, the reality is that the use of blockchain technology at an extensive level would reduce overall crimes.

We are moving past rigid systems with so much friction enabling multiple layers of crimes to take place, to a flexible and cost-saving system of operations across the board.

The district administration for a town in India has digitized all land records dating back to the 1950s and stored them on the Avalanche blockchain in a move toward transparent, tamper-proof land governance.

On March 6, the Dantewada District Administration of Chhattisgarh, India, announced that it had digitized over 700,000 land records via the Office of Land Records. The digitized records were secured on the Avalanche blockchain in collaboration with Indian blockchain startup LegitDoc by Zupple Labs.

“For decades, our citizens faced significant delays in accessing their land records, with verification sometimes taking weeks. By digitizing these records and securing them on blockchain, we have ensured they are easily accessible and cannot be tampered with.” — Cointelegraph report

First off, I imagine that something like this would involve some layer of encryption given the sensitivity of the data involved.

The report does point out that the application is permissioned and requires Tehsils level revenue officers authorization to access.

Given that we are very much in the early stages of adoption of blockchain technology, I would say that this is totally fine and I imagine that no one would like to otherwise have their sentiment data out in the open on a public and globally accessible database.

That said, we will, at some point, have solutions that enable peer-to-peer sharing of such data wherein direct owners of properties such as lands can easily relay the validity of their ownership to potential buyers permissionlessly.

There's currently little information on how these records are managed extensively and what processes proves validity at the moment, but it's still a welcomed development to have a public blockchain as Avalanche be used to securely store data of over 700,000 lands in a nation as India.

This must save thousands of man hours and cost. Certainly, it will help fight crimes associated with faked data on landed properties.

Part of the initiative happens to include the installation of kiosks in every sub-district of the town, where citizens and government officers can access land information when authorized.

The company behind the development of this system, LegitDoc, has in the past been responsible for enabling the storage of 1.1 million+ diploma certificates onchain, saving 50,000+ man hours and improving variability time to 10 secs.

This is an example of how much value comes with having a database system with zero liability to single points of failures. The future involves putting everything onchain, drastically reduce cost, eliminating wastefulness and giving room for fresh value generating systems to improve our economies, system of business, education, and governance.