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Indian City of Raipur Puts Real Estate Records on Blockchain with AirChains
Raipur, the capital of the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, has started moving its property records to the blockchain with the help of Air chainsbased in India Zero-knowledge roll-up (ZK).
The Raipur Municipal Corporation administers the area, issuing more than 8,000 building permits, work orders, and colony development permits annually. The corporation has put out a tender to have its records on the blockchain, and AirChain emerged as a partner through that process, Abinash Mishra, Commissioner of the Raipur Municipal Corporation, told CoinDesk in an interview on Thursday.
“We issue building permit certificates and have had a lot of issues in the past like forged documents,” Mishra said. “We developed the solution with the AirChain team and are now exploring a similar blockchain-based digital documentation of essential services that urban bodies typically produce, such as birth, death and marriage certificates.”
CEO of AirChains Ankur Rakhi Sinha told CoinDesk that this marks the first use case of Zero-Knowledge Fully Homomorphic Encryption (zk-FHE) in India. “ZK is used to prove that something is true without revealing additional information, while FHE is used to perform computations on encrypted data without having to decrypt it,” Sinha writes in a blog.
Sinha said that Raipur Municipal Corporation has its own set of servers and all the encryption keys are ordered directly from the government body.
“We are not live on chain yet, we are encrypting old certificates and we have completed about 100,000 certificates on ZK and once we are live, we will bring the current (daily) data as well,” Sinha said. “Each building permit will have its own smart contract and every update on the building permit will be updated on that similar smart contract.”
Mishra of the Raipur Municipal Corporation told CoinDesk that fact-checking in building permit applications takes “at least a month” between “seven days” for a bank to grant a loan and reporting that to the municipal commissioner who will then write to the subordinate. The goal here is to reduce that time to a matter of three days.
“Certification should be secure and decentralization is the future we should be working on,” Mishra said. “This is a small initiative we have taken. I think a lot of people will adopt it.”
AirChains has previously collaborated with other Indian state authorities on similar projects.