E-Governance: A Tendering Framework Using Blockchain With Active Participation of Citizens

E-governance, i.e., the use of information technology for government activities to provide services, exchange information, etc. are becoming increasingly popular. One such area of e-governance is e-tendering. While e-tendering makes the tendering process more efficient, a trust deficit remains between the citizens and the government, due to the centralized management of the whole tendering process. Several research works provide a decentralized solution to make the process of e-tendering more secure, transparent, and fair. However, in the present time, the government posts the problems/issues currently they are dealing with; and seems interested in taking the suggestions from the citizens to make the better solution for the problem. Thus, in this paper, a permissioned blockchain-based approach to provide a transparent and fair tendering system with citizens’ active participation and tracking of funds is presented. In the proposed scheme, the citizens can see the tendering activities transparently and give ideas and suggestions to solve the government’s posted problems and receive a due credit of that contribution is a fair manner.