Blockchain-based smart contract for issuance of country of origin certificate for Indian Customs Exports Clearance

The imports and exports are the major activity of any customs department of the country. Customs officers have to verify all the documents as per the customs act of the country, requirements, and give clearance for exports and imports. But due to the limited period and ease of doing business initiatives, it is impossible to verify each produced paper. Sometimes, forged documents may be produced by parties, and based on illegal documents; illegal exports and imports can be taken place. Due to existing message exchange and application program interface (API)-based information interchange among participating parties having their centralized server, the possibility of delay in message and authenticity of the sender, information mutation may occur. So the concept of blockchain overcomes these issues by enabling secured, encrypted, immutable transactions among participating parties such as exporter/importer, banks, customs, shipping lines, international parties, and so forth. Thus, this paper proposes a blockchain-based Business process model and notation (BPMN) framework and smart contract for the country of origin certificate management system against forged certificate in Indian customs and international usage and usage of IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) for sharing multilateral agreement files on the blockchain network.