Abstract

Land disputes form a substantial share of pending civil cases in India, and the cost is structural: ownership records sit across five separate offices patwari, tehsildar, sub-registrar, survey, and State Revenue Department that have never shared a single source of truth. Existing blockchain proposals for Indian land records either treat the chain as a future replacement for the statutory record, which is legally premature, or build flat permissioned ledgers that ignore the role hierarchy governing the actual workflow. This paper presents a prototype that addresses this gap by modelling role-aware governance, privacy-preserving document handling, and auditable workflow execution within a Hyperledger Fabric-based land-record framework. The proposed system models six administrative roles as distinct Membership Service Providers on Hyperledger Fabric v2.5.4, encodes mutations, encumbrances, and disputes as first-class chaincode states with role-aware endorsement, and combines ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption for long-lived role-driven document access with identity-based encryption for short identity-and-time-bound disclosures. This 2 in 1 privacy design increases the level of confidentiality and enables administrators to easily track users' activity at any time as needed. With the workload mix applied using publicly released sub-registrar volume data of two districts of Punjab, the benchmark attained a peak throughput of 612 ± 18 tps and had a mean end-to-end latency of 1.84 s at 400 tps on a cluster of 5 nodes. The observed saturation knee was blamed on CouchDB write contention, as opposed to ordering or endorsement being a problem. The framework is important, as it is proposed as a validation and audit overlay to be used in parallel with the statutory record.

Keywords

Blockchain Governance, Hyperledger Fabric, Indian Land Records, Attribute-Based Encryption, Permissioned Ledger,

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