Mumbai: A student of class 9 from Mumbai developed a BlockChain based Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) to establish a transparent voting mechanism which includes verification and validation of votes cast in any election. Meedhansh Gupta (14), who is also a recipient of the Prime Minister award, designed the first-ever model combining the current EVM features with BlockChain technology.
At a press conference organised at the Mumbai Press Club on Tuesday, Meedhansh demonstrated the use of the BlockChain EVM. As the current EVM model and the ballot paper system do not allow anyone to identify who voted for whom and if their vote has been counted, the BlockChain model EVM developed by Meedhansh is supposed to allow people to anonymously verify their casted vote.
This model allows verification and validation of the casted votes by using Blockchain technology. The teenager claimed that with this model, anyone can anonymously check their vote to know who they have voted for and can also validate the total vote count with the convenience of the open ledger concept of BlockChain and time stamp protocol.
“Though currently EVM is a secure standalone device and technically tampering cannot be done as per ECI protocol but the question still raises related to trust issues. Therefore to establish a strong confidence in the elections and keeping in mind the interest of the government, opposition, the election commission and general public, this system has been designed,” Meedhansh said.
To develop this unique EVM design Meedhansh learnt a one-year course in BlockChain technology from IIT Madras at the age of 12 years and learnt various other technologies from platforms where he also created a world record of completing 50 courses in just one week.
Traditional databases rely on a centralised authority, making them susceptible to single points of failure and vulnerabilities. In contrast, a blockchain is a distributed ledger that operates on a peer-to-peer network. To put it succinctly, nobody owns blockchain technology, and yet, everybody owns it. That is one of the unique features of blockchain tech, and this collective ownership and accountability is what makes blockchains very secure, immutable, tamper proof and impossible to hack, he added.
“Meedhansh started showing his potential at the age of 5 years and his first achievement was as the youngest website developer at the age of just 9 years, which was also recorded as a national record in the India Book of Records. His contribution to the society was commendable even during the Corona pandemic, where he developed many portals like CoronaFreeWorld.com and MissionFateh.com For this work, he was also given the Prime Minister National Child Award in the year 2022 in the social service category,” said his father Sandeep Gupta.
