Tokenising trust: How land reform can meet India's digital ambition

As India pushes for "ease of justice", land tokenisation could reduce disputes, unlock stalled wealth and align legal reform with digital public infrastructure ambitions

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) conference, he introduced a new axis of governance reform: ease of justice. Just as ease of doing business and ease of living became administrative mantras of the last decade, he said, ease of justice must now define the next one. Technology, he argued, must play a central role in reducing pendency, improving access, and modernising systems of delivery. His emphasis was timely. Land and property disputes continue to dominate India’s civil docket; nearly two-thirds of civil cases and over a quarter of Supreme Court matters relate to ownership and title conflicts. Studies have estimated that such litigation locks assets worth over ₹20 trillion, freezing both household wealth and urban development. The Prime Minister’s call, in essence, was about making rights enforceable and transparent, an idea that finds a natural ally in India’s growing conversation on asset tokenisation.

 

 

Tokenisation refers to the digital representation of ownership rights on a distributed ledger. Each token integrates smart contract technology, allowing for the embedding of data, rights, and obligations directly within the token, whether over land, gold or equity, and can be divided, transferred, or traded securely, ensuring that every lifecycle event is accurately captured. Globally, this transformation has begun to redefine how capital markets and property systems operate. JPMorgan recently tokenised a private-equity fund on its blockchain network; Singapore and Switzerland have authorised tokenised real-estate exchanges. India’s response is taking shape within its emerging financial innovation ecosystem, especially in GIFT City, where pilots like Terazo and Tokeny have tokenised commercial real estate to test fractional ownership and programmable compliance under regulatory supervision.

 

Land is particularly suited to tokenisation because its core problem is not scarcity but credibility. Title records in India remain fragmented across departments, often incomplete or contested, and the absence of conclusive titling makes every transaction a potential dispute. Tokenisation imposes precision. To issue a token, one must define what exactly it represents: freehold, leasehold, or development rights; and link it to a verifiable registry entry. Each transfer updates the ledger immutably, creating a transparent, auditable chain of custody for ownership. If designed well, this approach could drastically reduce the scope for duplication, forgery, and encumbrance fraud. The implications go beyond legal clarity. The fiscal gains for states are equally significant. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s Handbook of Statistics on Indian States shows total own-tax revenue of states rising to ₹7.4 trillion in 2023–24, with stamp duty and registration fees forming one of the largest components — contributing up to 16 per cent of own-tax receipts in major states such as Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Improving the integrity of valuation and preventing leakages in these transactions can therefore materially expand state revenue. Land tokenisation would not only reduce court workloads by lowering the incidence of disputes but also increase predictable, high-quality revenue for state governments by ensuring fair and efficient property transactions.

 

The next challenge lies in designing the governance architecture for such a system. The policy questions are complex and intertwined. At the legal level, India must determine what status a token actually carries: is it a security, a digital certificate of title, or a new hybrid category that straddles property and finance law? At the operational level, one must ask who holds custody of the underlying asset: an independent trustee, a regulated custodian, or the token issuer, and how that relationship is enforced when ownership is transferred digitally. The design of trading mechanisms will also matter.

 

The issues of compliance and transparency are equally important. How should identity verification, know your customer (KYC), and anti–money laundering checks work in tokenised ecosystems in cross-border transactions and arrive at global standards for the same? What disclosures must issuers provide about usage, income, valuation and occupancy through data oracles and audited smart contracts? Finally, questions of interoperability and resilience loom large: how can state land registries interact seamlessly with blockchain networks, and how to build disaster recovery and security resilience in the same. These are the design choices that will decide whether tokenisation becomes an instrument of trust or merely a digital abstraction layered over an unreliable base.

 

International experience offers valuable guidance, but India’s strength lies in its ability to fuse legal reform with technological innovation. State governments such as Telangana have already issued technical guidance notes on asset tokenisation, experimenting with digital registries and blockchain-linked verification of ownership. These early efforts show that tokenisation need not wait for national legislation; it can evolve alongside ongoing land record modernisation projects. By aligning legal reforms with digital infrastructure, India can avoid the fragmentation that has historically plagued its real-estate markets.

 

The larger goal, however, extends beyond technology. The Prime Minister’s focus on ease of justice calls for a techno-legal transformation—one where digital systems are built to uphold rights, not just efficiency. India’s experience with the JAM trinity—Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile, demonstrated how digital public infrastructure (DPI) could solve welfare and payments challenges at scale. That was our Web 2.0 revolution: identity, inclusion, and money made portable and verifiable. The next phase, driven by tokenisation and blockchain, represents our Web 3.0 leap: ownership, contracts, and enforcement made transparent, programmable, and tamper-proof.

 

In that sense, tokenisation is not a financial innovation alone; it is a governance instrument. It offers a way to embed legal clarity, privacy and smart contract technology into code and bring predictability into one of India’s most contentious sectors. If property rights can be made as reliable as digital payments, the benefits would cascade through credit markets, urban planning, and infrastructure finance.

 

For India, the task ahead is clear. Just as JAM and UPI turned welfare leakages into direct benefit flows, tokenisation can turn land into a trusted digital asset. By aligning law with code, India can make “ease of justice” not just a legal ideal but a measurable outcome, where every citizen’s right to property is as secure, visible, and transferable as a UPI transaction. If we get it right, tokenisation will not just digitise assets; it will digitise trust itself. 

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Dr Arvind Gupta is an adjunct professor of data and digital economy, and head, Digital India Foundation

 

Beatriz Callaghan is APAC Business Development and Strategy lead, Digital Assets Alliance 

Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper