New Town Kolkata Development Authority explores NFTs for land records 

The New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) is planning on using NFTs for maintaining land records in the city. 

Recently, NKDA announced that it is going to call for applications to develop Municipal Property Registration Certificates using Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs)government. 

New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) is the city planning authority of New Town, a planned satellite city of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal. The city comes under North 24 Parganas district. 

This would not be the first attempt at converging governance and administration with Web3. The Gadchiroli administration, a small village in Maharashtra started a pilot project to upload 65,000 tribal caste certificates on the Polygon blockchain. Moreover, the Maharashtra government partnered with Web3 startup LegitDoc to upload diploma certificates of students on the blockchain network. 

Sharat Chandra, crypto expert and vice president of research and strategy at EarthID told Business Today that this is a commendable initiative. 

Approving this initiative, Chandra said, “Tokenization of real-world assets such as real estate in the form of non-fungible tokens will ensure tamper-proof land titles and enhance the liquidity of these assets in primary and secondary markets.” 

Talking about the shortcomings of this initiative, the crypto expert said, “Though state legislatures are free to legislate when it comes to matters related to land, a non-fungible token representing ownership of a land parcel would lead to legal conflict between the state and the union of India. The Union government has broadly defined Virtual Digital Assets in the Finance Bill 2022 and has reserved the right to determine what would constitute an NFT. So, the West Bengal government NKDA's decision to tokenize land titles in NFT might potentially get caught in legal cross-hairs.” 

Highlighting other challenges, he said, “Taxation of 30 per cent on NFTs will also dampen the tokenization of land and impede sales in secondary markets." 

What are NFTs? 

NFTs stand for Non Fungible Tokens. They are unique and non-interchangeable units of data stored on the blockchain network, which is a type of digital ledger, and the owner of the NFT gets a proof of ownership certificate from the digital ledger.  

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