An Indian city announces a plan to use blockchain technology to deliver government services through electronic caste certificates.

Gadchiroli, a state in Maharashtra, one of India’s most industrialized states, plans to use the Polygon blockchain to issue caste certificates to 1.1 million residents. The villages that are targeted for the implementation are Etapalli and Bhamragad.

Polygon blockchain is a decentralized sidechain scaling solution. India Times called it the “next big thing in the crypto world.”

Gadchiroli’s government plans to implement the project through LegitDoc, a blockchain digital platform provider.

Neil Martis, the co-founder of LegitDoc, said, “70 percent of people in the Gadchiroli district are tribal, which means most of them require a caste certificate.” He added that using a blockchain-powered caste certificate will allow the government to distribute assistance efficiently.

Shubham Gupta, the Assistant Collector of Gadchiroli, said that despite issuing digitally signed caste certificates, most of “the population still relies upon physical documents to hold caste certificates.”

Verifying the physical documents by manually looking for their application number is “administrative intensive, and there’s no easy mechanism for external parties to verify the data,” Gupta added.

The government’s plan to use digital caste certificates will ease the administrative burden and address any issues in handling physical versions of the certificates.

Martis explained that the verification of the digital caste certificates includes three elements. “A document issuer, document holders, and document verifiers,” he said. “To facilitate this, all the three mentioned stakeholders have to come together, which requires infrastructure. This is already available on Polygon blockchain,” he explained.

Since Polygon is a decentralized blockchain, it is safer than privately operated blockchains.