Business News | Skill Passport Launches in India: A Unified Digital Identity for Professional Credentials, Powered by Blockchain and AI
Get latest articles and stories on Business at LatestLY. New Delhi [India], March 28: A consortium of companies has launched Skill Passport, a blockchain and AI platform that verifies professional credentials in seconds and gives every user a single, tamper-proof digital skill identity. The platform aligns with global standards, including verifiable credentials--built for students, working professionals, employers, universities, and government bodies that need credential data they can actually trust.
VMPL
New Delhi [India], March 28: A consortium of companies has launched Skill Passport, a blockchain and AI platform that verifies professional credentials in seconds and gives every user a single, tamper-proof digital skill identity. The platform aligns with global standards, including verifiable credentials--built for students, working professionals, employers, universities, and government bodies that need credential data they can actually trust.
Background verification firms report that 10 to 20 percent of Indian candidates carry discrepancies in their educational qualifications--and that figure does not account for the far larger number of genuine credentials that cannot be confirmed fast enough to matter. The fragmentation runs deeper than fraud, as the India Skills Report makes clear: a degree sits with one institution, a certification with another provider, and an internship record somewhere else. Over time, even genuine credentials become hard to validate quickly because no single layer brings all of this together.
Skill Passport tackles this by doing something no existing platform in India has done at scale: verifying credentials directly from the issuing source and recording them on Kalp DLT -- a permissioned blockchain infrastructure -- so the record is tamper-proof, permanent, and instantly accessible to anyone the holder chooses to share it with. A degree, a certification, an internship completion letter, a work history -- all of it lands in one verified identity layer that travels with the professional, not with the institution that issued it.
Mrityunjaya Prajapati, Founder & Architect of Skill Passport -- which provides the blockchain backbone for the platform -- framed the launch in terms of what India's digital infrastructure has so far left unfinished. "We built Aadhaar to prove who someone is. We built UPI to move their money. But we still have no reliable, instant way to prove what someone can actually do," he said. "That gap has real consequences. Skill Passport is built to close it. Blockchain handles the trust layer--the immutability, the compliance architecture, and the data governance. What the consortium has assembled on top of that is the product India's workforce has needed for a decade."
A Platform Built Around Verified Inputs, Not Just Uploaded Documents
Storing a PDF of a degree is not the same as proving it is real. Uploading a certificate to a profile is not verification. Skill Passport works with credentials authenticated directly from universities, training bodies, and employers, recording them on blockchain so the record is permanent, tamper-proof, and accessible only to those the holder explicitly permits.
The UGC has flagged 32 fake universities across 12 states. But the less-discussed problem is legitimate institutions that close, merge, or lose access to historical records -- leaving graduates unable to prove qualifications they genuinely earned. Once a credential is recorded on blockchain, it persists regardless of what happens to the issuing body.
What Skill Passport Actually Does
Each user gets a single digital skill identity covering:
- academic qualifications
- vocational or technical certifications
- internship and training records
- employer-backed work credentials
- skill-related data points that help build a fuller professional profile
Beyond verification and storage, the platform adds an AI layer with two key outputs. The first is a skill strength score--a weighted assessment factoring in the standing of the issuing institution, recency of the qualification, and whether real work experience supports it.
The second is an Industry Fit Index, which maps a user's credential profile against live hiring demand by city and sector. If you are a final-year engineering student in Pune and the local market has shifted to cloud infrastructure and DevOps, the platform tells you that before placement season, not after.
Prajapati put it plainly: "The platform answers two questions the existing system cannot. What has this person actually built? And where does it fit in today's market?"
Different Users, Different Value
Skill Passport is designed for multiple stakeholders simultaneously. Students build a verified professional identity from their first internship. Working professionals carry a portable, tamper-proof credential record across employers. Hiring teams cut verification from weeks to minutes. Universities issue credentials that stay verifiable permanently. And for HR and hiring teams, it aligns with evolving workforce verification practices highlighted by organizations such as SHRM, where faster and more reliable credential validation is becoming critical.
Why the Consortium Chose a Permissioned Blockchain Model
Credential data is personal, regulated, and sensitive -- properties that a fully public blockchain cannot accommodate. Kalp DLT's permissioned model gives Skill Passport the tamper resistance and cryptographic trust of blockchain while enforcing access controls, user consent, and governance at the infrastructure level.
The platform is built to comply with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 from the ground up--a critical requirement for any university, employer, or government body whose legal teams will scrutinize it before deployment.
The Infrastructure Behind Skill Passport
Kalp Digital, which provides Kalp DLT as the blockchain infrastructure layer, brings an established track record. Its developer platform, Kalp Studio (kalp.studio), has onboarded more than 15,000 developers across 50-plus blockchains--meaning Skill Passport runs on infrastructure already proven at enterprise scale.
What Comes Next
The roadmap points toward a fully connected layer where verified credentials, skills intelligence, and live market demand work together in one system, aligned with India's broader digital public infrastructure ambitions, including Digital India.
India adds more than 10 million new job seekers every year. The gig economy is on course to more than double -- from 12 million to 23 million workers -- by 2030. Meanwhile, 66 per cent of the country's unemployed population already holds a graduate degree. The qualifications exist. The workers exist. The jobs exist. What does not exist is a reliable, instant way to connect all three. That is what Skill Passport is built to do.
About Kalp Digital
Kalp Digital builds blockchain infrastructure for developers, enterprises, and financial institutions. Its no-code platform, Kalp Studio, has onboarded over 15,000 developers across more than 50 blockchains. The company is led by Mrityunjaya Prajapati, a computer science graduate from NIT Bhopal with over 16 years of experience in software engineering, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.
About Skill Passport
Skill Passport is a blockchain- and AI-powered platform built by a consortium of companies to verify, structure, and analyze professional credentials through a unified digital skill identity layer. The platform serves students, universities, employers, training institutions, and government bodies seeking a more reliable way to manage and understand credentials at scale.
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