Blockchain-enabled Crafts Supply Chain for Rural Handicraft Artisans: An Implementation Approach

Abstract

Abstract The rural handicrafts industry is a highly fragmented industry with many small-scale businesses. Despite its cultural and economic importance, this industry encounters challenges like intermediary exploitation, restricted market entry, and lack of a credible product authentication system, making it susceptible to competition from cheaper machine-made alternatives. It can lead to loss of sales and reputational damage endangering both the artisans' livelihoods and the craft's sustainability. To address these challenges, establishing end-to-end visibility within the rural handicrafts supply chain offers enhanced transparency, traceability, and authentication. This fosters trust among the various participants in the supply chain. However, ensuring the integrity of the supply chain data is essential, necessitating a mechanism to secure production process information, verify product and artisan authenticity, and enable transparent transactions. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled crafts supply chain for rural artisans and presents an innovative implementation approach using the real data (artisan and product profiles) from rural kantha artisans in Birbhum district, West Bengal. By leveraging the decentralized, immutable, and transparent nature of blockchain, our approach provides a practical framework that could be adapted to other similar contexts.