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Ironically my parents Drs. Jugal Kishore Sharma and Nishi Sharma left India to study at UC Berkeley partly to escape the corruption in India, partly for greater opportunities, they still felt proud of India, it’s heritage, it’s culture to convince fellow professors how great India is. They often talked about UC Berkeley events like “India Student Nights,” where students, faculty and often visiting professors like Dr. John Kenneth Galbraith would attend and discuss current affairs in India over chai and samosas. Dr. John Kenneth Galbraith not only was the inventor of the Minimum Support Price for Farmer’s which is still hotly debated and protested now, he saved India in ’62 when China attacked, as the US Ambassador to India, by convincing JFK to help India in it’s time of need. Otherwise, India would be Tibet now, under Chinese rule!
My parents then 5 years later made Akshay Bhavan in my name in New Delhi’s Mansarover Gardens, using their hard-earned money from the US, and Canada, only to lose it all to an uncle who threatened them with “Goondas!” in 2011. A sad end to my parent’s dream for a better India, with respect to Indian property.
Family disputes over property and inheritance are common in virtually every Indian family I know!
Property disputes can be within the family over inheritance and legal rights, to external ranging from construction disputes, boundary disputes and title issues to illegal possession and non-payment of dues. It is imperative this be addressed for India to become an Economic Superpower.
A framework to solve this is needed as the Legal Systems there are known to take decades, and longer. Since I have personally lost property worth over ₹10 Crores now, my thought of purchasing or investing property in India is very low. Fortunately for me I have earned much more in the US and Canada, than the property value lost in India, so my motives are to help solve this issue for all.
The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, sought to protect homebuyers, promote fair practices, and bring transparency, accountability, and efficiency to the industry.
Unfortunately, what it doesn’t adequately address:
- Poor record keeping
- Lack of uniformity
- Legal loopholes
- Fraud, and Inheritance disputes.
The Promise of Blockchain Technology for India’s Titles and Deeds
Blockchain is a decentralized, tamper-resistant, distributed ledger technology that records transactions across a network of computers, and with Smart Contracts, can have policy controls enforced.
Enter Smart Contracts!
The fundamental difference between a traditional legal contract and a smart contract is precisely related to the enforcement of contractual terms, as legal contracts are enforced by people, and smart contracts by computers. The fact that smart contractual terms are written into an executable programming language implies that the agreed transaction can take place automatically after the occurrence of an event or after a specified time period, and policies encoded can be applied.
For example, let’s say there is a contract by which a property buyer makes an offer to purchase a given property, which means it’s taken off the marketplace. The purchaser of the property will need to show proof of funds available, or loans that can be applied. These can be encoded into a smart contract. A smart contract computer script can use data about the purchaser’s credit scores, bank account information, and income as an oracle to determine whether the loan can occur or if the full payment can be fulfilled. The smart contract could then be programmed to immediately transfer the property back to the marketplace if the transaction is not fulfilled.
Similarly, once the purchase has been completed, policy enforcement of title/deeds can occur as to who can put a lien on the property per policy, who can inherit the property per laws and any relevant wills, and potential land border disputes with neighbors can be enforced, as subsequent changes to the property will need to be policy enforced per the smart contracts.
Overall, I can say that the legal services industry for property titles/deeds will enter a period of significant disruption, notably related to the emergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain, and this paper is just a first step of this emergence.