Kerala Aims To Produce 20K Blockchain Professionals By 2021

Kerala’s IT secretary M Sivasankar, on Thursday (December 12), said that the state will produce 20K blockchain professionals in the next two years. He added that the state’s emphasis is on enhancing the quality of manpower steered by young startup companies.

“This is a great opportunity for us to build expertise in next-generation technology and knowledge sharing,” Sivasankar said at ‘BlockHashLive 2019’.

‘BlockHashLive 2019’ had been organised by the Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA) making a strong case for leveraging the potential of blockchain technology for the public through capacity building and promoting research, development and entrepreneurship. Sivasankar said, “Blockhash Live has been a great learning platform for us. We use this platform to check what we have achieved, our learning and future footprint.”

For the uninitiated, Richard G Brown, chief technology officer at R3, one of the world’s largest blockchain companies, explains that blockchain can store the entire record of all peer-to-peer transactions, which can not only be easily verified but also doesn’t let anyone manipulate or modify the data.

Blockchain, which is essentially a database of information, is a chain of blocks with each block storing the necessary information pertaining to past transactions such as date, time, amount etc.

According to Blockchain Report 2019 by NASSCOM, the adoption of blockchain technology in India is experiencing rapid growth. To push this growth further, the Indian government is currently working on a strategy to scale up and widely deploy the same. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is preparing an approach paper on National Level Blockchain Framework.

For MeitY, blockchain is one of the important research areas as it finds the potential application of this new-age technology in various domains such as governance, banking and finance, cybersecurity, among others.

Kerala isn’t the first state which has announced major plans for leveraging blockchain. Earlier this year in May, the Telangana government announced a draft blockchain policy to offer regulatory and policy support for blockchain startups based in Hyderabad.

The policy also plans to infuse funding towards research programs in blockchain technology through setting up research bodies in various institutes along with funding research scholars. Among other states, which have either already published a whitepaper, or working on the PPP model of blockchain projects in egovernance and other projects are Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra.

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