Kerala Blockchain Academy wins IET India Future Tech Award 2022

Bangalore, February 9, 2023:  The Kerala Blockchain Academy was honored with the India Future Tech Award 2022 by The IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) India, a global engineering body at the forefront of innovation, advocating and leading technology usage for positive social impact. The award was conferred for the academy’s ‘Project Immunochain’, which utilises blockchain and big data technology to address traceability issues for immunisation programs in India. The felicitation was done by Shri Suresh Prabhu, Former Union Minister with 10 Portfolios and 6 Times Member of Parliament at the IET Future Tech Congress 2022.

The tracking of vaccinations involves a number of parties and various levels of book-keeping processes. In the Indian context, there are issues with the traceability of vaccines from the manufacturing site, through the distribution mechanisms in the network of cold storage facilities, and the vaccine handling or administration facilities, till the end user. Immunochain is a cutting-edge, mobile or web-enabled vaccine traceability system for immunisation programmes in India that provides a completely open-source solution that is vendor-neutral, scalable, replicable and reusable across different immunisation programs. Through their technology, they have drastically reduced the administrative work involved in updating the ledgers and chances of human errors to near zero along with improving efficiency by reducing time for vaccination from 5 minutes to an average of 45-50 seconds.

“Technology is essential to producing influence. The IET India Future Tech Award honors a person, group, project, or organisation that has used interdisciplinary technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain or distributed ledger technology, internet of things (IoT), or machine learning, to have a significant positive impact on businesses, industries, or ecosystems as a whole”, says Shekhar Sanyal, Director and Country Head of IET India. “We take great delight in being able to acknowledge Kerala Blockchain Academy, for its project Immunochain which generated an unprecedented impact across healthcare. We are convinced that the project will serve as an example for young engineers to solve the challenges of the citizens in our nation”, he adds.