IIT Madras Strikes Pupil Election Voting to Blockchain, Identifies Challenges

In a bid to check using blockchain within the governance sector, IIT Madras has moved its scholar election programs from servers to blockchain. As half of a faculty membership devoted to blockchain-related analysis work, college students on the prestigious engineering school are trying to check the know-how alongside the themes of voting and IP safety, amongst others. In dialog with Devices 360, IIT Madras stated that its experiments with blockchain shouldn’t be seen as ‘betting on crypto,’ moderately as a pilot into exploring the distributed ledger know-how on a wider scale.

Professors Prabhu Rajagopal and John Augustine from IIT Madras collaborated with the scholars on the venture to introduce blockchain-based voting as a part of their scholar election course of.

Analysis and experiments at IIT Madras have proven that blockchains may enhance the governance system by bringing down the prices significantly and enabling a verifiable and tamper-proof voting course of.

“Blockchain gives a price discount to conduct and handle the general voting course of, which is in any other case not attainable when conducting large-scale elections utilizing different software program based mostly on servers. As well as, blockchain’s function that forestalls any adjustments to be made to the saved information brings an innate belief to the election course of,” IIT Madras college members concerned within the venture advised Devices 360. “Blockchain would be the spine of many inventions on this decade and can transform the functioning of assorted social establishments.”

Blockchain is a decentralised, distributed, time-stamped ledger used for sustaining a file of all transactions operating on the community. This ledger, as a substitute of being maintained by one particular person or organisation (which is the case in regular databases), is maintained by all of the ‘nodes’ on the blockchain, leading to political and energy decentralisation, representing true democracy.

IIT Madras has been making an attempt to include blockchain into its inner election system since 2022. Within the final two years, a number of the nation’s prime engineering minds have recognized some shortcomings related to integrating blockchain within the voting programs.

“The transaction velocity on blockchain is slower with present applied sciences and this must be improved if the system must be deployed on massive scales; additionally, guaranteeing that the system is safe from cyber-attacks poses some challenges on a wider scale implementation,” Professor Prabhu Rajagopal, Advisor (Innovation and Entrepreneurship), IIT Madras, advised Devices 360.

Rajagopal additionally famous that deploying the blockchain infrastructure to handle massive scale databases may also come throughout as an eventual problem that may must be dealt with tactically.

This yr, IIT-Madras has piloted a blockchain resolution developed by Plenome, a startup headed by Rajagopal and consisting of blockchain-curious college students.

“Voting know-how is one such space which is the bedrock of a democratic system. We intention to make this course of easy and accessible to folks of their consolation whereas concurrently bettering safety and decreasing general prices. Scaling up the elections will result in new challenges which we might be keen to resolve,” the institute officers famous.

The institute additionally lately initiated the work of drafting insurance policies to supervise the metaverse sector in India as a reference that the federal government may entry and utilise whereas deploying laws on the nationwide stage.

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