A Blockchain Framework for secure Digital Identity transactions in Indian Agri-subsidy system: Issues, challenges and benefits

Abstract

The Agriculture mechanization plays a critical role in increasing agricultural productivity and consequently rural prosperity. The Government of India (GOI) and in particular the Department of Agriculture and Farmers welfare (DAC&FW), ministry of agriculture has taken up initiatives to help farmers by sanctioning subsidy to procure modern farming tools and equipment's using direct cash transfer scheme. The current technological solutions/implementations of this scheme in India, suffers from various issues such as data duplication and fragmentation, insecurity, verification, inefficacy to trace reliable subsidy provenance and subsidy distributions. Hence, amidst existing technologies blockchain blends as a multifaceted technology to provide secure traceability, immutability and trust creation between the parties involved. Blockchain enables more secure management and storage of digital identities using robust smart contracts solutions to fulfill the trust creation between the stakeholders. The stakeholders who are the part of this process are the Farmer, Government of India and Department of Survey and Land Records. In this article, we put forward a blockchain based smart-contracts on digital identity management system model to identify, authenticate and authorize the stakeholders to record and access services from ledger. We also provide an analysis of the current issues faced by these stakeholders and also highlight the key issues, challenges and benefits involved in deployment of an identity systems.