IIT Madras migrates student election system to blockchain, identifies bottlenecks

To test the use of blockchain in the governance sector, IIT Madras has migrated its student election system from servers to blockchain. As part of a college club dedicated to blockchain-related research work, students from the prestigious engineering college are attempting to test the technology on topics such as voting and IP security. In a conversation with Gadgets 360, IIT Madras said its experiments with blockchain should not be seen as ‘betting on crypto’, but as a pilot in exploring wide-scale distributed ledger technology.

IIT Madras professors Prabhu Rajagopal and John Augustine collaborated with students on a project to introduce blockchain-based voting as part of their student election process.

Research and experiments at IIT Madras have shown that blockchain can improve governance systems by significantly reducing costs and enabling a verifiable and tamper-proof voting process.

“Blockchain provides cost reduction for conducting and managing the overall voting process, which is otherwise not possible when conducting large-scale elections using other server-based software. Additionally, the feature of blockchain that prevents any changes being made to the stored data brings an effortless trust in the election process,” IIT Madras faculty members involved in the project told Gadgets 360. “Blockchain has brought many changes in this decade. Will be the backbone of innovations. And will bring radical changes in the functioning of various social institutions.”

Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, time-stamped ledger that is used to maintain a record of all transactions running on a network. This ledger, rather than being maintained by a single person or organization (as is the case in normal databases), is maintained by all ‘nodes’ on the blockchain, resulting in political and power decentralization, which represents true democracy. .

IIT Madras is trying to incorporate blockchain in its internal election system from 2022. Over the past two years, some of the top engineering minds in the country have identified some of the shortcomings associated with integrating blockchain into voting systems.

“Transaction speeds on blockchain are slow with current technologies and will need to be improved if the system is to be deployed on a large scale; Also, ensuring that the system is secure from cyber attacks poses some challenges on wide-scale implementation,” Professor Prabhu Rajagopal, advisor (innovation and entrepreneurship), IIT Madras, told Gadgets 360.

Rajagopal also said that deploying blockchain infrastructure to manage large-scale databases may also emerge as an ultimate challenge that will need to be handled strategically.

This year, IIT-Madras has tested a blockchain solution developed by Plenom, a startup headed by Rajagopal and comprised of blockchain-curious students.

“Voting technology is an area that is the foundation of the democratic system. Our aim is to make this process simple and accessible to people at their convenience, while improving security and reducing overall costs. Expanding the elections will pose new challenges that we will be eager to solve,” institute officials said.

The institute has also recently begun work on drafting policies to oversee the metaverse sector in India, which the government can use and utilize while deploying regulations at the national level.