India Plans to Issue a National Blockchain Framework

The Indian government is preparing a national framework to support the wider deployment of blockchain use cases.

Minister of state for electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre said Wednesday that the government is drafting an approach paper on the National Level Blockchain Framework which discusses the potential for distributed ledger technology and the need for a shared infrastructure for different use cases.

Dhotre made the announcement in a letter addressing questions about blockchain from members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament.

In response, Dhotre wrote, "MeitY has identified Blockchain Technology as one of the important research areas having application potential in different domains such as Governance, Banking and Finance, Cyber Security and so on."

According to the letter, the Indian government has already built the Distributed Centre of Excellence in Blockchain Technology, a project that develops and conducts research on blockchain technologies and their use cases.

There have been a slew of blockchain projects under development in India.

Last month, India's information technology services provider Tech Mahindra announced it was teaming up with Netherlands-based blockchain application incubator Quantoz to provide secure digital payments.

Tata Consultancy Services has also launched a multi-brand consumer loyalty platform on R3's enterprise blockchain Corda the same month.

India's defense minister Rajnath Singh also stressed the potential use cases of blockchain in the defense industry in a public speech on Nov. 4.While the country might be embracing blockchain, it has created regulatory challenges for cryptocurrency businesses.

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