Karnataka to use blockchain tech to issue 30,000 digital certificates for skill-based courses

Officials said digital certificates will bring more security, transparency and efficiency.

Karnataka, a pioneer in technology and innovation, is now placing big bets on blockchain technology.

The Karnataka Skill Development Corporation (KSDC) has floated a tender to select a firm to implement blockchain-based digital certificates for skill-based courses.

KSDC is the flagship organisation for the Government Tool Room & Training Centre (GTTC), an educational institution of the Karnataka government which provides skilled manpower and technical services to existing and emerging industries.

GTTC offers a wide range of technical courses like Computer-aided Design (CAD), Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM), Computerised Numerical Control, Rapid Prototyping, etc.

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"GTTC offers both long-term and short-term skill training courses. Candidates will get certificates after successful completion of the courses. These certificates can now have a digital tinge which would enhance their credibility,” Ashwin D Gowda, managing director, KSDC, told Moneycontrol. 

He said they will finalise the tender titled 'Comprehensive blockchain enabled digitisation of examination and centralised student placement platform for GTTC' in a few weeks

Last year, KSDC piloted the technology and issued 180 digital certificates to those who underwent training. This year, it plans to issue around 30,000 digital certificates.

Officials said digital certificates will bring more security, transparency and efficiency. This will also reduce manual verification processes as individuals can easily share their credentials with employers or educational institutions. They said blockchain-based certificates will prevent fraudulent representation of qualifications.

"These digital certificates are secure and accessible from anywhere. These cannot be altered/duplicated, and can be easily verified by employers/third parties. This will reduce the risk of fraud or other types of credential misrepresentation,” said a KSDC official.

This project also involves a centralised student placement module which will coordinate interview inquiries from industries with the main placement cell of GTTC.

 The GTTC will generate soft copy PDFs of the certificates of students as usual. Instead of printing the certificates, the PDFs will be uploaded to the issuance software installed on the GTTC server. The issuance software will calculate a unique and irreversible digital fingerprint (SHA 256 Hash) of each PDF certificate.

The PDF certificate fingerprints will later be uploaded to the public blockchain (Polygon) and mapped against GTTC using a unique algorithm.

After the successful upload of the certificate fingerprints on the blockchain, unique blockchain proofs will be generated for each PDF certificate. These blockchain proofs will be combined with the original PDF certificate generated by GTTC to form a digital PDF file. The digital certificates will be dispatched to students via email or file server.

The verification software, a web app hosted on the GTTC website, directly accesses the blockchain data. Any verifier can upload a student's blockchain digital file to the verification portal to authenticate and verify the certificate.

The verification portal will extract the blockchain proof from the digital certificate, calculate the digital fingerprint of the digital certificate and check the validity and availability of the digital fingerprint on the blockchain using the blockchain proof.