MVP phase · Government of India challenge (C-DAC / MeitY)
NV-TIP — verifiable integrity for digital evidence
A national-scale evidence-integrity platform: tamper-evident timestamping and chain-of-custody verification for digital forensics. Competitively selected and grant-funded through a Government of India technology challenge run by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) — now in the MVP phase.
The problem
Digital evidence is only as strong as its custody trail. Files pass through many hands between seizure and courtroom; without verifiable integrity records, challenges to authenticity are cheap and defence against them is expensive.
The approach
Evidence is fingerprinted (SHA-256) at the point of capture and never leaves custody — the platform stores cryptographic commitments, not the files themselves. Each exhibit gets its own hash-linked custody trail anchored to a permissioned, append-only integrity ledger operated by authorised institutions: no cryptocurrency, no public network, no tokens. Tampering does not just fail verification — it is pinpointed to the specific custody event that was altered. And proofs are portable: a custody trail can be verified offline, in a courtroom, with no connection to the platform at all.
Validation
NV-TIP was competitively selected through a national technology challenge run by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. The Government of India proof-of-concept grant was sanctioned in July 2026; the PoC was built, delivered, and demonstrated to the programme's evaluators; and Lambdac was then selected for the MVP phase — the stage where the platform is built out toward real-world deployment.
What national rollout would mean
NV-TIP is designed for national scale. Rolled out, it would give investigating agencies, forensic laboratories, and courts a fast, uniform answer to a question that today can consume weeks of testimony: is this file exactly what was seized? Custody events become checkable in seconds by any authorised party, challenges to authenticity are answered with a verifiable record rather than affidavits, and the integrity trail travels with the evidence across every institution that handles it. The protocol is deliberately domain-agnostic — the same verifiable-integrity layer extends to land records, audit logs, and any government document whose authenticity must be provable — which is why it is designed as shared infrastructure rather than a single-agency tool.