Telangana government will collaborate with Tech Mahindra and Eleven01 for the project.
India’s first Blockchain technology district will come up in Hyderabad as the Government of India has given its nod to the request of the Telangana government for it.
This was announced by Telangana IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao (KTR) who inaugurated a three-day International Blockchain technology meet here on Friday. KTR said that the state would earmark land and initial funds for infrastructure for the project.
Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, who addressed the gathering through teleconference from Delhi, said that Blockchain technology has a huge potential to create jobs in the country and has a significant place in the flagship schemes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kant said that the Niti Aayog accorded top priority to Blockchain technology and welcomes the exclusive district at Hyderabad.
The Blockchian technology district to come up on the outskirts of the city would have a range of facilities in this sunrise area including start-up clusters, incubators and research and development laboratories connecting domestic and international players in the field.
The Telangana government would collaborate with Tech Mahindra and Eleven01 in setting up this Blockchain district.
An official of Telangana’s IT department told The Sunday Guardian that the efforts to set up an exclusive Blockchain District begun almost three months ago ever since the international meet venue was finalised.
Bangalore and Gurgaon were other contenders to bag this prestigious IT thematic project, but the Union IT department and Niti Aayog favoured Hyderabad.
The major factors that tilted the scales in favour of Hyderabad for setting up the Blockchain district were the state government’s commitment to hand over its pet schemes of digitalisation of land revenue records and records of transport department to track the condition of automobiles and placing the certificates of students from SSC to graduation for their safe upkeep.
The Telangana government placed the Blockchain technology at the core of its new IT (information technology) policy’s 10 core areas.
If Blockchain technologies were utilised properly, the government believes that the quality of governance would improve.
Digital records of all governmental transactions and properties in Blockchain would not only help their safety, but also tone up the authenticity of governance.
Tech Mahindra’s managing director C.P. Gurnani, who signed a clutch of MoUs with the Telangana government and other private players on the second day—Saturday—told the delegates of the meet that the Hyderabad centre would attract several states in the country in promoting the use of Blockchain technologies in the country.
Blockchain technology that was first discovered in the early 1990s, gained momentum a decade ago and assumed significance in the IT field since 2015-16.
This newest technology helps turn all data fed into it into cryptographs and thus preserve it in an uncorrupted way.
Data stored in different blocks is linked in a chain fashion to ensure its safety, an official of Telangana’s IT department explained.