Introduction
Human civilization probably has never gone through such a rapid revolution in terms of technology than it is today. Recall all those movies in the past that projected the year 2020 with flying cars and robots in every house. While some of it may remain a far-fetched dream today, there are other innovations in technology, especially in the field of Information Technology, that the science fiction writers in the 80s couldn’t imagine back then. These technologies have not only completely revamped our lifestyles in the last few years, but are also helping a lot of developing countries flourish rapidly.
One such cutting-edge technology that’s booming today is Blockchains. The first thing that comes to a layman’s mind when he or she comes across this word is that blockchains are exclusively related to cryptocurrency. However, blockchain technology is, in fact, a rather subtle way of decentralizing the information that its reach can go beyond cryptocurrencies to other sectors, some of which are significant to our basic livelihood.
Now, let’s talk about all the ways in which blockchain is serving as a helping hand to developing nations around the world and how it can take these countries forward in the path of becoming self-sustainable in the near future.
Blockchain in Agriculture
Economies of most developing nations around the world are majorly dependent on agriculture. Just to give you a brief idea, about half of the entire population of India’s workforce was employed in the primary sector in 2014. Let’s see how blockchain can buttress the agriculture sector in developing countries.
Bolstered Inventory Management
One of the key issues faced by the agricultural sector is the mismanagement in handling and storing the harvest. Blockchain technology is handling this by monitoring every possible factor that an ideal agricultural inventory management system has to take into account. By utilizing a decentralized ledger which is easily accessible to everyone involved with inventory management, blockchain avails an ideal scenario for perfect communication and helps save crops from getting ruined.
Price Normalization
With blockchain, farmers can get a fair idea of local and international transaction trends, stock prices of commodities and much more. With all this data within their reach, they can ask for the right prices and save themselves from all the hassles of getting trapped in the web of unfair pricing.
Supply Chain Management
Farm producers in developing nations are using blockchain technology to ensure hitting the right target demographic in a supply chain. With blockchain, they are able to track their commodity and all the related stats regarding grain trading.
Sustainable Development
Several blockchain driven platforms have developed in recent years that incentivize sustainable practices in agriculture. These platforms are making use of the direct incentives obtained through blockchain and are thus able to reward farmers that practice more and more environment friendly techniques in their farming.
Dissemination of Farm Management Software
With the incorporation of blockchain technology, the demand for Farm Management Software (FMS) has grown significantly over the years. Future predictions have shown an even greater spike in the use of FMS, given the fact that farmers are implementing more IoT based gadgets in their farming and all that data is required to be safely stored via a secure method such as blockchain.
Blockchain in Health Sector
Now we come to yet another significant area where blockchain would be of immense help to developing nations around the world: the healthcare sector. Fortunately, there is already a lot of progress being made in bolstering the healthcare industry through blockchain in developed countries, and the developing nations are expected to follow the same footsteps soon.
Here is a short guide to the expected use case of blockchain in healthcare.
Patient Identification and Health Records
At present, there is no way of retrieving any patient’s medical history other than a few random records that they carry with themselves. In short, there is no universal patient identifier. That becomes a huge problem when doctors have to do surgeries on or prescribe medicines to random patients without having any patient records from their past. A systematic public blockchain would allow for a quick and secure transfer of patient details from one hospital to another, thereby reducing medical errors significantly.
Blockchain in Clinical Trials
Clinical Trials are done in order to determine the effectiveness of any medicine. A trial on a single medicine is conducted in a series of researches carried out by multiple entities. There are instances where mismanagement in handling this data results in misjudgment of a medicine and its efficiency. With blockchain, this huge data is not only immutable, but also secured with proof of existence. False medicines will never be able to see the light of day and the good ones are going to get quickly passed, all thanks to blockchain.
Conclusion
While blockchain may have started out as a means to replace bank notes through a secure online currency, it’s real utility is now being unearthed in a plethora of sectors. It’s safe to say that we have barely scratched the surface in terms of making the best use of this amazing technology, and with time, it will definitely turn out be a game-changer in modern human civilization.