The Maharashtra government has announced a collaboration with Indian blockchain company LegitDoc to create a credentialing system powered by Ethereum (ETH) that would provide tamper-proof diploma certificates.
The Maharashtra State Board of Skill Development (MSBSD) wants to address the surge in document fraud by breaking from the narrative of the Indian crypto prohibition and implementing a public Ethereum-based blockchain.
Commenting on the development, LegitDoc CEO Neil Martis stated that, while certificates are now validated using conventional manual techniques, MSBSD will begin recommending exclusively digital verification methods for all manual verification requests beginning next year.
“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,” he added.
Martis stated that mainstream universities such as the National Institute of Technology (Surathkal) and Ashoka University are in discussions to develop a similar approach to combat the continuous fabrication of credentials.
With the collaboration with LegitDoc, India joins the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Malta, and Singapore as early adopters of an e-governance system for education.
The first in India
Maharashtra would be the first Indian state to adopt Blockchain for educational certificates, as well as the world’s largest. Each student will get a digital file called “certficate LegitDoc.zip” that contains the original PDF diploma certificate and its accompanying blockchain proof file. It can be confirmed in less than ten seconds from anywhere on the globe and does not require human interaction.
Dr. Anil Jadhao, Chairman of MSBSD, stated that blockchain has the potential to reduce document fabrication fraud, adding:
“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.”
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