Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is the Telecom and IT minister in the government of India, has asked the National Informatics Centre to use the blockchain technology and come up with latest solutions based on this revolutionary technology for improving the quality of education in government schools.

He expressed his views while he was attending the occasion of inauguration of the Centre of Excellence in Blockchain Technology which has been set-up by the National Informatics Centre with an aim to offer blockchain as a service.

Mr Prasad further added that he is looking forward to the centre as well as the states to open up their doors for the start-ups who have been working under the defined norms. He said that “I am very keen on how we can leverage blockchain in primary education. In fact today I am going to give you a task NIC team. Can you think of a good application of blockchain technology for improving the quality of government schools all over the country? Public schools are good, private schools are good, but my take would be that we shall be able to leverage technology when the transformational change takes place.”

Blockchain technology is one of the biggest innovations of the last decade. It is an upcoming technology which can be adopted by various sectors like insurance, banking, healthcare, logistics, agriculture and many more.

This technology will help the government with the implementation of various schemes and add trust along with immutability to the assets. Mr Prasad also asked the NIC to start working towards the development of a mechanism for involving the start-ups as well in the technology space.

He added “India is home to close 26,000 start-ups. Out of which 9,000 are a tech startup. NIC can become a big patron of start-up movement. I always recommend even the centre and state governments must open doors for induction of start-up moment obviously under defined norms and condition to maintain transparency.”

The minister added that he expects that the blockchain technology will open new frontiers in the area of excise operations, governance, treasury management etc. He will like to see blockchain technology being used in  new areas like primary education, agriculture, health, and various others.

As per the NIC, the exploration and implementation of Blockchain in new avenues of the government operations are expected to improve the trust, transparency, and traceability in the e-governance systems.

The statement issued by the NIC states that the Centre of Excellence of the NIC on Blockchain will facilitate the various departments of the government in building proof of concepts of the usage of this technology in various dimensions of the governance, thereby leading to a massive deployment of such applications.