Add blockchain power to data integrity revolution

India can capitalise on blockchain's many benefits to prevent fraud, facilitate identity management, and monitor and streamline supply chains

- KIRAN VANGAVETI

Blockchain is often referred to as a silver bullet for lapses in data integrity. It is an immutable, decentralised, distributed, and public shared ledger or database that enables verified network participants to record transactions, track assets, and share other digital information across a network transparently. This promotes trust and traceability among all stakeholders.

The immutability of blockchain, or its resistance to manipulation, makes altering it a futile effort. Being a distributed registry, transaction records are held not by a single person, entity, or institution or within one legal boundary, but by multiple entities across the world. Thus, a single change would require changes and updates across the records of all these entities, making changes to blockchains computationally almost impossible to implement. This has made the adoption of blockchain technology an indispensable feature of the current discourse on data integrity.

India can also capitalise on blockchain's many benefits to prevent fraud, facilitate identity management, and monitor and streamline supply chains. The public sector has long been plagued by issues regarding the accuracy of records. Fraud is a recurrent problem tied to physical recordkeeping and human involvement at the registrar's office. Blockchain's real-time information-sharing capacities can help in fraud detection and prevention by reducing opportunities for fraud and the costs and time involved in its detection.

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