Niti Aayog and main fertilizer company, Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals Limited (GNFC) have settled into an agreement to jointly research and exchange information about Blockchain Technology for fertilizer subsidy management.
Both the companies have agreed on Statement of Intent (SOI) to work together towards applying a Proof-of-Concept (POC) application. Both the firms will jointly build a use case, research on various things, connect with various popular stakeholders, build blockchain solutions and share their learnings with each other. All the learnings, understandings and results of PoC will help NITI Aayog to provide policy references and actions in developing subsidy mechanism, keeping it more transparent and immune to leakages.
Presently, Fertilizer users produce around 31 million tons of fertilizers across the whole country, which means about Rs 70,000 Cr. of distributed to the manufacturing units. The present system of fertilizer and sales works on a multilayer, multi-agency, and multi-functional approach.
There are some leakages in the fertilizer sector in the stage of production and consumption. By utilizing GNFC Blockchain technology, the government will be able to track the movement of fertilizers on real-time-bases, thereby stopping the leakages. Also, the distribution of fertilizers will become fast and effective. This will be overall useful for the development of the country.
GNFC will be initially releasing a pilot project of the blockchain technology helpful for fertilizer sector. It will take over the characteristics of distributed computing ledger such as confidentiality, authenticity, non-repudiation, data integrity, and data availability.
By implementing the Blockchain Technology, fertilizer companies will have lots of advantages. Firstly, Government will provide a subsidy to fertilizer manufacturers in just 3-4 weeks instead of taking 3-4 months. Secondly, there will be complete transparency and no requirement of any mediator for validation. Thirdly, fast and efficient sales and distribution of fertilizers. The process will utilize smart contracts for rapid and accurate transactions with various parties with very less human interaction.
Lastly, the system will be mixed with soil card in the later phase, which will help farmers to use a specific type of fertilizer for soil heath.
