Blockchain-Based Government Fund Disbursal System using Blockchain and IPFS

In the modern landscape, most governments have financial incentives linked to most activities such as education in the form of scholarships, production and manufacturing in the form of production linked incentives (PLIs) and social security and retirement benefits. These social benefits sometimes take the form of giving financial assistance directly to the eligible in the form of bank transfers. However, these schemes are generally opaque in their operation in terms of allocation and timely disbursement of funds, leading to distrust in the government. This lack of transparency and inefficiency is generally attributed to corruption in local governmental bodies. Hence, a solution is required which introduces trackable and auditable disbursal of funds. Blockchain has been proposed as a viable solution for this purpose as fundamentally each transaction is recorded on a public ledger. However, multiple options exist for decentralized file storage such as Filecoin and Arweave, but they have built in incentives for pooling storage, leading to higher costs. And hence, the proposed model uses blockchain to execute smart contracts to establish the eligibility of an applicant, stores the applicant's necessary documents using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol, and transfers the funds in a decentralized manner.