Future of Blockchain in India

Blockchain has been gaining popularity all across the globe. In India, many industries have already started leveraging the benefits of this distributed ledger technology and many others are already developing path-breaking solutions based on blockchain. With every passing day, this technology has been making its presence felt in different ways.

As the country embraces digitization in various aspects of life, the future of blockchain technology is promising. The recent spurt of online payment solutions like GPay, Paytm, etc. is a simple example. So let’s look at the future of blockchain technology in India.

While most people know blockchain as the backbone of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, it is more than just that. This technology has the potential to radically transform business processes making them more transparent, secure, and efficient. While many industries are excited at the prospect of blockchain, it will be interesting to see how the Indian industries absorb this technology.

Blockchain in India: Current Scenario

Few of the early movers have been the FinTech companies. In India, the banking and insurance sectors have been the first off the block. Since it was known to power cryptocurrencies, it made sense for the Financial sector to be an early adopter. Some other sectors that have experimented with blockchain are public administration, healthcare, and logistics. The telecom, travel, and energy sectors are also expected to join the list soon.

While the early adopters have experienced the possible benefits of blockchain, they have also faced some challenges.

• Blockchain implementation is not similar to those of regular IT applications. Employees need to be made aware of the range of applications of this technology. Educating them is one of the biggest roadblocks.
• Once the employees are skilled up, the businesses need to identify processes and stakeholders for implementation
• Next, they need to find the right platform and vendors for testing the use-case scenario.
• They also needed to ensure the security and integrity of the data and look at future scalability.

With banking regulators like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) creating a division to explore the applicability of blockchain to the Indian banking and financial system through the regulatory sandbox, the future seems promising.

Future of Blockchain in India

According to the NASSCOM Avasant India Blockchain Report 2019, around 50% of the States in India are involved in various initiatives and are driving the adoption of blockchain in the country. Also, while the BFSI sector is leading the growth, there are several opportunities in the retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics sectors. Here are some important observations:

• The last few years have been about experimentation and identification of processes and use-cases across industries.
• While many Indian startups have been looking at blockchain technology for developing cost and time-efficient services, they are yet to tap into the global blockchain investment corpus.
• India, with its excellent client-enterprise relationship model, is uniquely positioned to become the biggest blockchain service provider in the world. The country needs to start investing in developing talent and make advancements in the process framework to make the best of this opportunity.
• Blockchain applications are being explored in the area of
  • Electronic voting system
  • Food safety
  • Medical records and patient data management
  • Reducing costs in logistics
  • Protecting organizational data from cybercriminals
  • Reducing paperwork in education and other sectors
  • Eliminating intermediaries in agriculture and retail

According to a Livemint report, the Indian Staffing Federation believes that blockchain is expected to create more than 30,000 jobs in 2020 alone. With merely 6500 qualified blockchain developers, these professionals are going to be in high demand in the near future. Education platforms like TalentSprint are helping fill this gap by offering Blockchain course in collaboration with IIIT Hyderabad Blockchain Center of Excellence.

Conclusion

Blockchain in India today is like what the internet was in the 1990s. While the internet brought information to our fingertips, blockchain technology has the potential to take it a step forward and induce ‘Value’ and ‘Trust’ on the internet. As the country absorbs the new technology, early adopters are bound to gain – be it businesses or professionals. India is one of the world’s youngest economies, and there are several challenges across sectors. However, going by the possibilities offered by blockchain, we expect a surge in its adoption soon.