The Maharashtra government recently announced a partnership with Indian blockchain startup LegitDoc to implement a voucher system operated by Ethereum (ETH) to help verify diploma certificates.
MSBSD Rejects the Indian Crypto Ban
In response to the increase in forged documents, the Maharashtra State Skills Development Board (MSBSD) rejected the Indian crypto ban and used a public blockchain based on Ethereum.
In a report, Neil Martis, CEO of LegitDoc, emphasized that while MSBSD is verified using traditional manual methods, MSBSD will only advocate digital verification methods in all years of manual verification requests.
Matisse showed interest from other local government agencies, saying:
“We have an active work order from the Govt of Karnataka (Dept of Information Technology and Biotechnology). We are in talks with the Government of Telangana (school education dept) and Higher & Technical education dept of Maharashtra to implement LegitDoc for their student community.”
Matisse said mainstream institutions like the National Institute of Technology (Surathkal) and Ashoka University are negotiating similar solutions to combat ongoing document forgery.
India Early Adopter of e-government System in Education
The partnership with LegitDoc has made India an early adopter of the joint implementation of an e-government system in education with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Malta and Singapore.
MSBSD chairman Dr Anil Jadhao quoting the blockchain’s ability to prevent fraud related to document forgery:
“In the last 10 years, there has been a rampant increase in forgery of government-issued documents which have caused huge financial & reputational losses to the stakeholders involved.”
Following MIT’s implementation of the Blockchain Diploma verification, Professor Stuart Madnick shared his view that blockchain poses a number of unique challenges.
As a reminder, Madnick think,
“The bottom line is that while the blockchain system represents advances in encryption and security, it is vulnerable in some of the same ways as other technology, as well as having new vulnerabilities unique to blockchain. Human actions or inactions still have significant consequences for blockchain security.”
