A new technology developed by Bhutanese innovators can eliminate land fraud, boundary disputes, and unauthorised property transfers. The breakthrough comes from a blockchain-based system designed by Chain Zeeper, one of two winning teams from Land Registry Hackathon, which ended yesterday. Their prototype replaces paper-based land transactions with secure digital records that require consent from all involved parties.
The new system aims to solve gaps in the current process.
According to the National Land Commission, which organised the hackathon with GovTech Agency, while eSakor handles core land registration online, many problems, such as forged certificates, fraudulent sales, and manual verifications happen in the surrounding processes.
The land commission has reported increasing cases of forged documents and fraudulent representation, particularly involving the sale of land owned by deceased people.
To solve this, the prototype will replace paper work with secure digital records and digital signatures from all parties involved.
The team has college students and employees of IT firms.
Tenzin Jamtsho, team leader of Chain Zeeper said, “One of the main issues that citizens face is that there is too much manual work to be done on any transaction of land. They need your documents signed, and in some case, you are not in the country, you need to trust your representative. Trust is the huge problem. With our system, you do not need a representative. You can do everything online, and you can verify that you are the person that is signing the document without the need for physical documents.”
The prototype also includes features to prevent overlapping claims and boundary disputes.
The second winning team, Hacket’s prototype, can benefit land owners as land transactions can happen digitally without having to come in person.
Sonam Yoezer, team leader of Hacket said, “Currently, the workers at NLCS are bogged down. They have to do manual verification of the documents. All of these can be done digitally, and their work is going to be reduced vastly and error as well, because there’s a case of human error when you’re doing manual verification of data.”
A mentor from the Ethereum Foundation said that if such a system can be integrated with the Bhutan NDI, it will be beneficial.
Austin Griffith, mentor said, “If everyone is on NDI and everything is digitised, then these prototypes are going to be really effective because they are going to use blockchain to go beyond what a private database can do. They are going to bring censorship resistance, tamper-proof, verifiability, the things you get from blockchain.”
As part of the next phase, the teams will refine their prototypes over the next month, to build a system that integrates fully with Bhutan’s digital identity infrastructure and existing land databases.
Namgay Dema
Edited by Tshering Zam
