Indian State of Maharashtra Explores Tokenizing Infrastructure Assets

Maharashtra, India's richest state, is working on a policy that could put electricity-transmission assets onchain. "Maharashtra is working on a policy, so that we can create a policy which is conducive to government of Maharashtra bringing its assets under tokenization," Praveen Pardeshi, chief executive of the Maharashtra Institution for Transformation and chief economic adviser to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, said in a keynote at an invite-only Mumbai event hosted by RealX and MST Blockchain at the World Trade Center.

"The transmission lines can themselves be tokenized, not fully, but even 40%, 50% of that," Pardeshi said. "People who hold that token can get part of the income which Maharashtra Transco Company is getting... the new money that it generates from the people who buy the token can help us to build more transmission lines, to build more solar energy storage centers." The model would raise money without selling assets outright: tokenize 40 to 50 percent of selected lines, share Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Company income with holders, and direct proceeds into new transmission and solar storage, crypto.news summarized.

Pardeshi rejected the idea that this amounts to selling off the state. "Tokenization doesn't mean privatization wholesale; it means circulating the capital to larger number of holders," he said. "The way the government looks at it is not to sell its family silver at all, but to make more citizens participate in the development activity of public asset creation."

He illustrated the need with power pricing. Distribution companies pay 16 to 18 rupees per unit at peak demand while electricity can go for 2 paisa on the power exchange during surplus hours, per his remarks. Those figures are his, not independently documented market data. He pointed to a local precedent for fractional ownership working: the Express Towers commercial building near his office, tokenized under a REIT structure, which he called a "happy, happy solution" for the seller and rent-sharing investors. What remains undisclosed is everything structural: which assets, how revenue reaches holders, who may buy, on which network, at what size, and when, crypto.news noted.

The state behind the proposal carries weight. Maharashtra accounts for roughly 14 percent of India's nominal GDP with about 130 million people, and global tokenized assets sit near $38 billion, concentrated in U.S. Treasuries and private credit, CoinDesk noted. Tokenized real-world assets have reached $34.6 billion in value, though only $3.79 billion of that is actually used in protocols, leaving about 89 percent inactive, per crypto.news.

The transmission idea runs alongside a separate land-token push. Days earlier, at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Fadnavis announced the draft Maharashtra Digitisation and Exchange of Land Token Asset Act, a framework for putting land and other immovable assets onchain, the Hindustan Times reported. Tokenization, he said, is not about speculation but about putting productive capital to work, bringing transparency, improving liquidity, and converting dormant wealth into economic opportunity, CNBC-TV18 quoted him. "UPI democratized transactions. The next generation of fintech must democratize credit, intelligence, ownership, and opportunity," CNBC-TV18 quoted him. He paired the ambition with a caution: "Innovation at this scale must be accompanied by legal certainty, consumer protection and regulatory trust," adding that execution needs deep cooperation between New Delhi's institutions and his government.

The numbers attached to the land bill are large. Assets worth about 50 lakh crore rupees could fall under it, per the Hindustan Times. The framework is being built with input from the market regulator SEBI and the BSE and NSE exchanges, plus industry, technology, legal, and academic experts, covering trading rules, compliance, and digital property rights. Recommendations have gone to an executive committee, with introduction aimed within four to five months, IANS reported via EdexLive. The bill is still being drafted, not enacted. In July, Fadnavis directed officials to draft it and form an expert committee, CoinDesk noted.

Neither the transmission proposal nor the land bill exists in a vacuum. India taxes crypto gains at 30 percent with a 1 percent withholding tax, requires exchange registration with the Financial Intelligence Unit plus anti-money-laundering compliance, and hosts 54 registered providers serving about 39.3 million verified users holding roughly 20,437 crore rupees, Business Standard reported in July. The Reserve Bank of India leans toward prohibition: it told a parliamentary committee crypto should not be legalized, and documents from May and June argue banks and financial firms should be barred from holding or trading crypto and private stablecoins to limit contagion, The Hindu BusinessLine reported. Tax data shows about 39 million traders held some $2.1 billion at the end of May, while fewer than a quarter of the 645,000 who transacted in the fiscal year ending March 2023 reported those trades.

Yet the same establishment is testing tokenization on market rails. At the same Mumbai fintech event, the RBI governor and SEBI chair jointly announced a Demat 2.0 pilot for tokenized corporate bonds using distributed ledger technology with the wholesale digital rupee and atomic settlement, The Economic Times reported. Three issuances followed within days: REC raised 500 crore rupees from 18 investors on Sept. 7, Larsen and Toubro raised 500 crore from four investors on Sept. 9, and IIFL raised 25 crore from a single investor the same day, totaling 1,025 crore. An analysis in The Hindu placed the DELTA bet in this current, alongside the Metropolitan Stock Exchange handling a tokenized IIFL issuance and the IFSCA consulting on real-world-asset rules, with Switzerland's DLT Law, Singapore's Project Guardian, Hong Kong's Project Ensemble, and British and Emirati sandboxes as international reference points, the paper wrote.

For precedent on governments issuing onchain, Hong Kong remains the marker: an HK$800 million tokenized green bond, one-year Hong Kong dollar paper priced at 4.05 percent, settled the next day in February 2023 through the monetary authority's clearing system on a private Goldman Sachs blockchain, described as the first tokenized green bond from a government anywhere, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said. Europe offers the regulatory template and its limits: MiCA has applied in full since December 2024 for crypto-asset providers and stablecoin issuers but does not cover tokenized deposits or securities, while the DLT Pilot Regime lets venues test tokenized shares and bonds with exemptions, drawing modest participation that prompted the Commission to propose an extension, the Commission wrote in April.

What Maharashtra has approved so far is neither a transmission offering nor the land law. The record shows a policy in development, a bill in drafting, and a state arguing that tokens can fund infrastructure while the assets stay public.