Rajeev Chandrasekhar Launches National Strategy on Blockchain

New Delhi: Celebrating Azadi Ka Digital Mahotsav, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology & Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, released the National Strategy on Blockchain on 3rd December 2021.

The strategy document aims at creating trusted digital platforms through shared Blockchain infrastructure; promoting research and development, innovation, technology and application development; and facilitating state of the art, transparent, secure and trusted digital service delivery to citizens and businesses, thus making India a global leader in Blockchain Technology.

Blockchain is an apt technology for e-Governance solutions and other domains, leading towards enabling trust in digital platforms. Blockchain provides the required security and privacy, and allows only trusted entities with privileges to record and access details in an accountable manner.

National Strategy on Blockchain has been formulated by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India with the vision to create trusted digital platforms through shared Blockchain infrastructure; promoting research and development, innovation, technology and application development; and facilitating state of the art, transparent, secure and trusted digital service delivery to citizens and businesses.

This strategy document lays out overall vision towards development and implementation strategies for a National Blockchain Platform covering the technology stack, legal and regulatory framework, standards development, collaboration, human resource development and potential use cases. It is envisaged that this strategy document would provide the necessary guidance and support for realizing the vision and creating a nationwide ecosystem for creating the National Blockchain Platform and development of relevant applications using this platform in various domains.

The Minister also launched India’s first indigenous Server— RUDRA developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) supported by MeiTY and DST.

This is a step in direction towards achieving the goals of attaining self-reliance in Supercomputing moving towards Government of India National initiative of AatmanirbharBharat.

Rudra Server, an outcome of NSM Phase-3 deliverable which aims at Design and Manufacturing of Supercomputers in India, is Secure, Reliable, Dual Socket based on current generation of Intel Xcon scalable processor technology and supports accelerated computing. It is a dense form factor server with centralized power supply in half width 1U and 2 U form factors with compute power ranging from 3.6 T1 to 34 IT. It is poised to demonstrate India’s competency to design, develop, build and deliver as per nation’s multidisciplinary computing needs, and has critical strategic and national importance. A wide spectrum of sectors including HPC systems, Hyperscale Data Centres, Edge Computing, Banking & Commerce, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas Industry, Healthcare, Education, Entertainment Industry, Defence and National Security stand to benefit immensely from the indigenously-built server,. The server design can be used for manufacturing classical standalone commercial servers and also as building blocks for building large supercomputing systems of tens of petaflops of computing performance. It is aimed at achieving better energy efficiency, density and architectural features to suit requirements of the national mission. Indigenous Direct liquid cooling technology is being explored for inclusion in the design for better cooling and energy efficiency. C-DAC is collaborating with technology partners Intel and NVIDIA, and manufacturing partner ATOS.

The Highlight and the much awaited moment for all the startups and students was their interaction with the Union Minister of State – MeITY/MSDE, Rajeev Chandrasekhar. The Minister spent quality time interacting and understanding the various solutions devised by the participants of the Swadeshi Microprocessor challenge. He also announced the top 10 winning teams of the – Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge to provide further impetus to the strong ecosystem of Start-up, innovation and research in the country. He further assured full support to them from the ministry of electronics and IT and termed them as partners in scripting India’s journey towards a leader in the field of electronics and semiconductors system design and manufacturing

The Challenge was announced last year in August to promote innovation around home-grown hardware compute system in continuation of Government’s efforts to position India among those select few countries, who holds full control over Microprocessor technology.

Under the aegis of Microprocessor Development Programme of Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), a power-pack duo of indigenously developed processors has been developed from the scratch using Open-Source Architecture, christened as SHAKTI processor by IIT Madras and VEGA processor by C-DAC.

The design, development & fabrication of these state-of-the-art processor variants at foundry in the country and abroad, is the successful step to leapfrog to ultimate goal of vibrant ecosystem of Electronic System Design & Manufacturing in the country.As one of the concrete steps towards realizing the ambition of self-reliance and a momentous stride towards “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, this initiative is aimed at meeting India’s future requirements of strategic and industrial sectors and most crucially cutting de pendency

Driven by the vision of Hon’ble Prime Minister providing impetus for AatmaNirbhar Bharat & being Vocal for Local, achieving self-reliance in compute designs is emerging as the priority sector for the government. It is one of the pillars of “Digital India” programme and ‘Make in India’ initiatives.

Open to students at all levels and startups,the “Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge” is part of the series of graded measures taken by MeitY to spur the technology led innovation ecosystem in the country and staying at the forefront of digital adoption. The Challenge demanded contestants to not only tinker with these Swadeshi Processor IPs & facilitate them with innovating the frugal solutions for societal needs but also make available the entire home-grown ecosystem around Swadeshi Processors to develop the complex designs for catering to both global and domestic requirements in near future.

Within no time of launch of Challenge, 6200 Teams (having 1000 members) of Start-ups &Students including 517 Start-up Teams, 3566 Teams from Educational Institutions and 2000 Teams of other innovators, accepted to participate and demonstrate their keenness to contribute to the overall government’s mission of #AtmaaNirbhar Bharat by adopting Swadeshi technologies.

The contestants of the challenge were offered by MeitY a slew of benefits & technology resources that includes not only 5 rounds of training opportunities and regular technical guidance from the best processor designers at IIT Madras & C-DAC but also fundingsupport-to the tune of Rs. 4.40 Crore at various stages of the Challenge for developing the hardware prototype and incubating start-up.

The Challenge, after 15 months from launch date, is now culminating with announcement of top 10 teams, wining the finale, who will be getting the seed fund worth Rs 2.30 Crore and 12 months incubation support, and above all, an opportunity to translate their innovations around Swadeshi Processors, showcase them at a higher viewership platform and facilitating them to scale from ideation to marketplace.