Web3 startup Airchains partners with West Bengal's government institution

Kritarth Agrawal and Ankur Rakhi Sinha, co-founder of Airchains

Web3 middleware SaaS startup Airchains is partnering with West Bengal’s New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) to digitally record and track the land ownership and mutation system by using blockchain. Airchains will introduce 500,000 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) deployed on Polygon Supernets. Transforming the land mutation process across 27,000 acres will replace traditional bureaucracy with a transparent and secure digital system. The blockchain model also facilitates fractional property ownership, opening up to 1 million new mutation opportunities. Implementing blockchain in governance applications will reduce fraud, increase efficiency, and improve security in land ownership records.

For instance, if one wants to buy land in Kolkata’s New Town, they need to pay a mutation fee. Earlier, there was no proof of mutation, and there was no proof of calculation on mutation. There were multiple departments handling this process, and now it will all be under one roof in the NKDA app. NFTs would be issued for a specific set of mutations. This land mutation record will enable a secure digital environment with unique NFTs serving as land ownership proofs for all properties under the jurisdiction of NKDA as well as lifetime tracking of concerned ownership.

This solution will allow easy transfer of ownership rights for landowners by transferring the corresponding NFTs, thereby eliminating complex paperwork. It will enable digitisation of proof of records as distinct NFTs, updation of NFT records in cases of transfer, recovery of records in cases of loss, and prevent evasion of mutation charges. Acquiring physical copies of these NFTs includes a printout in card format possible via any printer. The digital certificates would further contain QR codes that would allow quick and easy access after authentication.

However, the regulatory concerns with Web3 still remain a challenge. Airchains claims to have figured out a way to address this. "We don’t get involved in crypto transactions. We choose a gasless method or a more easy method of doing the transaction. We take that headache away. Our users just have to pay and move on. In India, there is a lot of institutional demand for keeping the chain private or not exposing it to cryptocurrencies. That's how government institutions mostly deal with it. So we always make sure that the chain is private, or even if it is public, the transactions are gasless," explains Ankur Rakhi Sinha, founder of Airchains.

New Town Kolkata stands as an extraordinary project, where every land detail is exclusively managed by HIDCO, acting on behalf of the state government, explains Debashish Sen, IAS and chairman of NKDA. “This distinctive arrangement provides us with a remarkable advantage in the land market, supported by a decade's worth of meticulously documented records. Through our partnership with Airchains, we can transform our exceptional advantage into a tangible force in the land market. Our objective is to streamline the process of buying and selling land, eliminating the inherent challenges associated with such transactions. To accomplish this, we have identified NFTs as the perfect solution, as they enable the physical tokenisation of properties, simplifying the entire procedure.”