BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND LAW: OVERVIEW OF THE EMERGING LEGAL AND REGULATORY FRAMEWORK IN INDIA

Blockchain technology is a distributed, tamper-proof ledger system that records transactions across a decentralized network of nodes. It has rapidly moved from financial experimentation to the forefront of national policy debate. While the technology first gained public attention as the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, its applications have since expanded to supply chains, land records, judicial documentation, healthcare and governance. For India, a country concurrently grappling with digital transformation ambitions and regulatory caution, blockchain presents a dual challenge, harnessing its transformative potential while constructing a clear legal architecture capable of addressing its novel risks. India's legal response to blockchain has been neither uniform nor comprehensive. Instead, it has proceeded in fragments, through taxation legislation, anti-money laundering notifications, judicial observations on electronic evidence and ministerial strategy documents. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a National Strategy on Blockchain in 2021, laying out a vision for deploying blockchain across forty-four identified sectors. Building upon this, the government formally launched the National Blockchain Framework (NBF) in September 2024, with a budgetary allocation of ₹64.76 crore, providing indigenous, modular Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) infrastructure deployed across National Informatics Centre (NIC) data centres. Yet, despite this institutional momentum, India continues to lack a combined blockchain law and a series of critical legal questions relating to smart contracts, evidence admissibility, data protection and virtual asset regulation, remain only partially resolved.