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Govt. ties up with US-based firm to promote blockchain

ConsenSys will provide expertise

The State government has signed an MoU with New York-based blockchain technology powerhouse ConsenSys as an additional step to bolster the blockchain ecosystem. The partnership seeks to incubate an innovation ecosystem for blockchain technology in Andhra Pradesh, release issued here by Fintech Valley Vizag said.

Through the MoU, ConsenSys will provide strategic technical advisory to prioritise and pilot use-cases in the area of blockchain. The areas of collaboration include land titling, supply chain, identity platform and electronic health records. The government wants to develop Visakhapatnam as a blockchain hub.

The State and ConsenSys will collaborate to establish the first Indian cohort of ConsenSys Education, an institute to develop blockchain-centric education programmes, by leveraging the latter’s proprietary educational content. The State will help drive recruitment efforts for ConsenSys Academy pan India and will subsidise infrastructural and operational costs.

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An Indian state wants to use blockchain to fight land ownership fraud

  • The government of India's Andhra Pradesh state has partnered with Swedish start-up ChromaWay to build its blockchain-based solution
  • It is estimated that $700 million is being paid in bribes at land registrars across India
  • ChromaWay has already piloted a blockchain project in Sweden focused on the process of buying and selling real-estate
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India's land ownership system is apparently fraught with fraud — so one state is exploring the application of blockchain technology to make it more transparent.

The government of Andhra Pradesh has partnered with Swedish start-up ChromaWay to build its blockchain-based solution.

Distributed ledger technology allows data to be stored in vast groupings, which are encrypted and tamper-proof. It is maintained across a network of computers around the world and has no central authority to oversee it.

 

"The current system is rife with corruption," J. A. Chowdary, special chief secretary & IT advisor to the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, told CNBC in an email Sunday.

It is estimated that $700 million is being paid in bribes at land registrars across India, Chowdary said.

"Fraud is rampant and disputes over titles often end up in court. Matters related to land and property make up about two-thirds of all civil cases in the country."

ChromaWay has already piloted a blockchain project in Sweden focused on the process of buying and selling real-estate. This time it wants to combine the features of a traditional land registry database with that of blockchain technology.

The technology

The blockchain trial will be built on ChromaWay's "Postchain" platform, which is a combination of blockchain technology and mature database systems.

Users interact with a web application on the front-end, and the data is processed by blockchain technology on the back-end.

"Using a new architecture combining blockchain with database, a consortium database, ChromaWay have made a registry that is transparent, resilient and secure, but also has the traditional database features necessary for a registry," ChromaWay CEO Henrik Hjelte told CNBC in an email Sunday.

Originally used as the technology to underpin bitcoin, blockchain technology is increasingly being seen as applicable for a whole range of industries.

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This Indian City Is Embracing BlockChain Technology -- Here's Why

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently hailed blockchain’s transformative potential and emphasized the need for "rapid adaptation," a rare instance of a head of state publicly praising the technology.

Blockchain’s grand promise is to do for transparency what the Internet did for communication. It increases trust between two parties -- a particularly big deal in economies with low counterparty trust. More than 80% of Indians work in the informal economy, which relies more on interpersonal trust than formal contracts, leaving them vulnerable to fraud. The country has a 69% bribery rate and was ranked the most corrupt nation in Asia in 2017. Loan frauds average almost $2 billion a year, and to hedge against this, interest rates on business loans routinely run high, up to 20%, denoting low trust.

Modi's comments were not in isolation. For a while now India has been bullish on blockchain -- and a port city, nicknamed “the city of destiny” and relatively unknown on the world stage, is emerging as the country's blockchain hub.

Enter Vizag

In 2016, the government of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh launched the ambitious “FinTech Valley Vizag” initiative with the aim of building Visakhapatnam, or Vizag, into a world-class fintech ecosystem bringing together government, academia, corporates, investors and entrepreneurs.  FinTech Valley Vizag’s chief architect, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, has done this before. He's widely credited with transforming Hyderabad, which hosts the Indian headquarters for both Google and Facebook, into a premier tech hub.

As of late 2017, FinTech Valley Vizag has attracted $900 million in investment and created 5,500 jobs -- though the original aim was to create an incredible 500,000 jobs by 2020. Subsequently, Andhra Pradesh has become the first state in India to adopt blockchain for governance. It has piloted two key projects: managing land records and streamlining vehicle registrations. Blockchain helps to protect the state’s digital assets and transactions, preventing tampering by outsiders or even government insiders. This is a big deal in a country where, as per a study by think tank Daksh, property-related disputes account for a staggering 66% of all civil cases and a 0.5% drag on the GDP. The state plans to eventually implement blockchain across the entire administration.

 
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come out as an advocate for blockchain technology. (MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images)

Andhra Pradesh state has also partnered with private companies to test use cases. For example, it has now secured more than 100,000 land records through Indian blockchain startup Zebi Data, which is also working with other states including Maharashtra and Telangana. Swedish blockchain startup, ChromaWay, has also partnered with the state to provide land registry solutions, leveraging lessons from projects abroad including those with Lantmäteriet, Sweden’s land registry authority, and Kairos Future, a consulting firm.

FinTech Valley Vizag plans to build the largest repository of blockchain use cases in other key areas such as transport, finance and digital security. It has partnered with Covalent Fund to create Velugu Core, a pioneering India-focused blockchain stack. This would make government data freely and digitally available through open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which could then be used by developers to build apps. For example, an individual looking to purchase a particular property could hypothetically access government data through an app built using this stack and get public information on all previous ownership and transaction details. Vizag has also partnered with KPMG to launch a BFSI use case repository program to identify blockchain and other tech solutions to common problems in the banking, financial services and insurance sectors.

Other initiatives include creating several business accelerators and innovation labs, as well as specialized centers of excellence in collaboration with Thomson Reuters (for IT and digital content) and Broadridge for blockchain. FinTech Valley Vizag is also offering generous incentives (monetary, regulatory and infrastructure support) to proactively attract the best talent and develop the region’s thought leadership in fintech and blockchain.

A New Template For Tech Innovation

Vizag’s success in blockchain and fintech is striking for several reasons and can provide a valuable template for other successes in India.

First, it reflects a wider trend of not just metros, but smaller cities in India today (Vizag is a “Tier 2” city) taking the lead in tech transformation. Second, the government, rather than the private sector, is promoting innovation. Third, startups are incentivized to collaborate directly with the government and tap into its vast resources -- a significant development in an ecosystem where they typically steer away from the government, due to red tape and lengthy sales and payment cycles.  Finally, FinTech Valley’s entire approach in using state-of-the-art technology to solve pain points uniquely relevant to India is a departure from the typical Indian business approach of replicating tried-and-tested business models and taking a conservative approach to risk.

Vizag’s success hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Andhra Pradesh is currently ranked the best state in India for the ease of doing business. The state, being newly reorganized in 2014, is itself in “startup” mode. Unburdened by inefficient past processes, it has taken a big lead in peeling away residual red tape, reducing risk and improving incentives. Now, other states are following suit. Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Kerala recently announced broad support for blockchain and pilot projects in similar use cases as Andhra Pradesh to bring more transparency to governance.

In recent years India has renewed its commitment to innovation, particularly tech innovation, treating it as a matter of national interest. Flagship initiatives like Digital India, that aims to transform the knowledge economy, and Startup India, which aims to foster entrepreneurship and innovation -- together with a variety of incentives -- have boosted morale in the tech and business community. Vizag’s initial successes promise to pave the way for an India-wide rollout and bring blockchain into the mainstream.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Exclusive: Andhra Pradesh adopts blockchain technology for DNA sequencing of citizens

Our partnership with Shivom explores the possibilities of providing an efficient way of diagnostic services to patients of Andhra Pradesh by maintaining the privacy of the individual data through blockchain technologies, says J A Chowdary, IT Advisor to Chief Minister, Government of Andhra Pradesh.

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With as many as two billion genomes expected to be sequenced by 2025, Chandrababu Naidu led government of Andhra Pradesh has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with German firm Shivom to use the latter blockchain-based global DNA ecosystem to enable predictive medicine for state's citizens. Andhra Pradesh which is India's eighth largest state with a population of over 60 million has also selected blockchain technology primarily to maintain the privacy of citizens DNA data.

Shivom is a genomics and precision medicine company that leverages blockchain technology to connect patients, researchers and clinical laboratories to one another. Its blockchain based healthcare platform aims to be the largest unique genomic and healthcare research hub. Under this MoU, Shivom will collaborate with Andhra Pradesh government in the areas of genetic science and FinTech for financial inclusion projects.

“Our partnership with Shivom explores the possibilities of providing an efficient way of diagnostic services to patients of Andhra Pradesh by maintaining the privacy of the individual data through blockchain technologies,” said J A Chowdary, IT Advisor to Chief Minister, Government of Andhra Pradesh.

With this partnership, Shivom will establish a development center at Fintech Valley Vizag and also work closely with the state government’s International Institute of Digital Technologies (IIDT) at Tirupati on cybersecurity and analytics.

“Whilst diversity is all around us in the physical world, it is still lacking in the existing genomic data available to researchers around the world. This results in exclusion, as minority and under-represented groups miss out on the benefits from advances in predictive and personalised medicine because abnormal genomic variations that exist in their ethnic or geographical location will not be present in the data that researchers are working with,” says Dr. Axel Schumacher, Co-Founder, and CEO, Shivom.

“At Shivom, we are passionate about changing the healthcare status quo and driving a fundamental evolution that results in a system of universal access to the best and most effective predictive medicine. This agreement with the state of Andhra Pradesh is hugely significant for Shivom as it is the first step towards a new, accessible world of healthcare,” said Dr. Schumacher.

Company said that this partnership demonstrates a shift in focussing just on genomic data for research and instead using the predictive power of the genetic data to empower the Andhra Pradesh healthcare system to shift from reactive to more preventative.

As public outrage over the amount of personal information that platforms such as Facebook and Google are choosing to store, while not revealing exactly why, reached boiling point this week, little has been written about the mass storage of DNA data that continues to grow. Shivom said it is first DNA sequencing platform to put the ownership of an individual’s DNA in their hands.

"We view the future as consumers owning their own health data,” said Gourish Singla, Co-Founder and COO of Shivom. ”Most of us are oblivious of the implications of giving away personal information, and the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica issue has demonstrated just how important it is to be aware of who owns your data and what they are doing with it. This is why we are proud to be the first DNA sequencing platform to put the ownership of an individual’s DNA in their hands,” said Singla.

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