IIT Madras moves student election voting to blockchain, identifies challenges

In an effort to test the use of blockchain in the management sector, IIT Madras has moved its student selection systems from servers to blockchain. As part of a college club dedicated to blockchain-related research work, students from the prestigious engineering college are trying to test the technology on the topics of voting and IP protection, among others. Speaking to Gadgets 360, IIT Madras said its blockchain experiments should not be seen as a “crypto bet” but rather a pilot project to explore distributed ledger technology on a larger scale.

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

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

“Blockchain offers a reduction in the cost of running and managing the entire voting process, which is otherwise not possible when conducting large-scale elections using other server-based software. In addition, the blockchain feature, which prevents any changes from being made to the stored data, brings innate trust to the election process,” IIT Madras faculty members 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, time-stamped ledger used to maintain a record of all transactions performed on the network. This ledger, instead of being maintained by a single person or organization (as is the case in normal databases), is maintained by all the “nodes” of the blockchain, resulting in political and power decentralization representing true democracy.

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

“Blockchain transaction speed is slower with current technology and this needs to be improved if the system is to be deployed on a large scale; also ensuring that the system is protected from cyber-attacks poses some challenges in deploying on a larger scale,” Professor Prabhu Rajagopal, Adviser (Innovation and Entrepreneurship), IIT Madras, told Gadgets 360.

Rajagopal also noted that deploying blockchain infrastructure to manage large-scale databases could also be a potential challenge that would need to be handled tactically.

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

“Voting technology is one such area that is at the heart of a democratic system. We strive to make this process simple and accessible to people at their comfort, while improving security and reducing overall costs. The increase in elections will lead to new challenges, which we will strive to solve,” the institute notes.

The institute has also recently started work on drafting policies to oversee the metaspace sector in India as a reference that the government can access and use while implementing regulations at the national level.