IIT Madras moves student electoral voting to blockchain and identifies challenges

In a bid to test the use of blockchain in the governance sector, IIT Madras has moved its student election systems from servers to blockchain. As part of a university club dedicated to blockchainAs part of the research work, students from the prestigious engineering school are attempting to test the technology on the topics of voting and intellectual property protection, among others. In a conversation with Gadgets 360, IIT Madras said that its experiments with blockchain should not be seen as “bets on cryptocurrencies”, rather as a pilot project to explore distributed ledger technology on a larger scale.

Professors Prabhu Rajagopal and John Augustine from IIT Madras collaborated with students on the project to introduce blockchain-based voting as part of the student electoral process.

Research and experiments at IIT Madras have shown that blockchains could improve the governance system by considerably reducing costs and enabling a verifiable and tamper-proof voting process.

“Blockchain offers a cost reduction to conduct and manage the entire voting process, which would otherwise not be possible when conducting large-scale elections using other server-based software. Furthermore, the feature of blockchain that prevents any changes from being made to the stored data lends an innate trust to the electoral process,” IIT Madras faculty involved in the project told Gadgets 360. “Blockchain will be the backbone of many innovations in this decade and will radically change the functioning of various social institutions.”

Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, timestamped ledger used to keep a record of all transactions running on the network. This ledger, rather than being maintained by one person or organization (as is the case with regular databases), is maintained by all “nodes” on the blockchain, resulting in politics and power decentralizationwhich represents true democracy.

IIT Madras has been looking to incorporate blockchain into its internal electoral system since 2022. Over the last couple of years, some of the best engineering minds in the country have identified some shortcomings associated with integrating blockchain into voting systems.

“The speed of transactions on the blockchain is slower with current technologies and this needs to be improved if the system is to be implemented on a large scale; furthermore, ensuring that the system is secure cyber attacks it poses some challenges on larger scale implementation,” Professor Prabhu Rajagopal, Consultant (Innovation & Entrepreneurship), IIT Madras, told Gadgets 360.

Rajagopal further noted that implementing blockchain infrastructure to manage large-scale databases could also prove to be an eventual challenge that will need to be managed tactically.

This year, IIT-Madras piloted a blockchain solution developed by Plenome, a startup led by Rajagopal and made up of blockchain-curious students.

“Voting technology is one such area that forms the foundation of a democratic system. Our goal is to make this process simple and accessible to people in their comfort, while improving safety and reducing overall costs. Enhanced elections will bring new challenges that we will be eager to resolve,” institute officials noted.

The institute has also recently started the work of policy making oversee the metaverse industry in India as a reference that the government could access and use when implementing regulations nationwide.

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