By Sri Varshith Kumar Reddy E

The Reserve Bank of India opened its first blockchain-friendly regulatory sandbox in 2019. It welcomed smart contracts and distributed ledgers, drew a hard line around cryptocurrency, and set a small industry to work. 

Seven years on, the country is still, in effect, running the same experiment. 

A farmer in Jammu whose land title now lies on a distributed ledger has proof of ownership that cannot be silently altered by a clerk with a grudge or a bribe. 

A supplier three tiers down an MSME supply chain can tokenize an invoice and get paid faster than the paperwork used to allow. 

These are not small things. They are also, seven years in, still pilots.

That difference between demonstrated value and permanent funding is the real story of Indian blockchain policy, and it is worth looking at closely, because the fix is neither expensive nor ideologically fraught. 

It does not rely on India resolving its ambivalence about cryptocurrency. It depends on ministries agreeing to stop treating separate successful experiments as separate successful experiments.

Start with the legal ambiguity, because it is the cheapest problem to solve and the one doing the most silent damage. 

A fintech building a land-records product or a supply-chain finance tool today has to guess whether regulators will treat it as “crypto-adjacent” and freeze accordingly. 

Parliament could end that guessing game with a........

© Kashmir Observer