Digital Identity: Application of blockchain in public data

Abstract

India is the largest democracy in the world with the second largest population (Source: World Bank Data, 2022). When it comes to governance, organized digital demographic data is one of the essential components of the modern era of data-driven technologies. Even though the government has initiated several steps to digitalize data, recent incidents of COVID had pointed out the necessity of further robust measures. For example, data related to migratory workers during lockdown, the number of citizens who needed social relief, and data on daily infection and death counts were unorganized initially. In our day-to-day life, we have to bear the nuisance of carrying multiple id-cards for various functionalities. For example PAN for financial identity, Aadhaar card for personal identity, driving license, PPO book for pension holders, health insurance card, and so on. Due to the multitude of information points for a single citizen, it is operationally challenging for the government to monitor or track all those points (the idcards). At the same time, it is difficult for citizens to maintain such a long list of id-proofs. Another challenge is data manipulation. Since the different governing bodies work separately, there is no in-place real-time data transfer mechanism among them. As a result, manipulating the personal data in any of these identity documents is an easy task. Several instances of duplicate id-card, fake id-cards, id-card of non-existent persons, etc. emerge frequently. This is a real threat to national security as data manipulation makes it difficult to identify unauthorized citizens. So can we aggregate all such fragmented data sources from where all necessary information will be embedded and can be retrieved easily? Is there any benefit to that? Is there any potential risk associated? Is it even a feasible idea to implement?