Law & Ethics¶
Law & Regulation in Procurement¶
Blockchain creates an irrefutable transaction history, which could support efficient and transparent document distribution while also generating important receipts for legal matters
By using blockchain to maintain an ongoing record of document exchanges, vendors and agencies protect themselves from instances of non-repudiation or miscommunication
Legislative Inventory - The following laws, rules, regulations, guidelines, policies governing public procurement in India have been reviewed and critically analysed with a view to bringing out competition distorting provisions contained therein and suggesting necessary changes in the laws to address the competition issues and highlighting an approach to facilitate competition in the sector:
General Financial Rules, (GFR) 2005.
State GFRs.
Delegation of Financial Powers Rules (DFPR), 1978.
Guidelines issued by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC).
Guidelines issued by the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposal (DGS&D)
Manuals on the procurement of goods, services and work issued by the Department of
Expenditure, Ministry of Finance.
Guidelines on procurement issued by individual ministries/departments, PSUs etc.
Defence Procurement Procedure 2008
The Public Procurement Bill 2012
The legal and regulatory public procurement framework in India broadly includes the following elements:
Constitutional provisions: The Constitution of India authorises the Central and State Governments to contract goods and services in the name of the President of India or the Governor of the State (respectively) and directs autonomy in public spending.
Legislative provisions: There is no comprehensive central legislation exclusively governing public procurement. Nonetheless, various procurement rules and policies (see below) are guided by central legislation such as the Contract Act 1872, Sale of Goods Act 1930, Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996, etc.
Administrative guidelines: Comprehensive administrative rules and directives on financial management and procedures for government procurement are contained in the General Financial Rules (“GFR”) initially implemented in 1947 and last changed in 2017. All government purchases must adhere to the principles outlined in the GFR, which include specific rules on procurement of goods and services and contract management. In addition, the Manual for Procurement of Goods, 2017 (“MPG”) holds guidelines for the purchase of goods, and the Delegation of Financial Powers Rules, 1978 (“DFPR”) delegate the government’s financial powers to various ministries and subordinate authorities. In 2017, the government issued the Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order 2017 which grants purchase preference to local suppliers based on certain conditions to promote manufacturing and production of goods and services in India.
Technical Ethics¶
The intersection of Blockchain , Law and Ethics is a brand new paradigm for research in recent years. Contemporary research primarily addresses technology aspects, while issues , such as empathy, privacy ,ethics , security, ethics, trust, reliability, usability, accessibility and acceptability , have been totally neglected Conflicting requirements for example “right to be forgotton” in case of GDPR , also make it extremely hard to visualize a holistic approach.
On the other hand, opportunities exist for these to support one another. Particullarly, w.r.t TenderBullet , where the core ethical question of introducing integrity to the process The main objective of this paper is to present our vision for next generation procurement system and to explore pertinent factors. We propose a unified framework that plans to incorporate AI , IOT and a game theoretic model to address intivisation of actors. We illustrate our work in progress using an example. We then present major challenges for the realization .
Discussing about ethics, as something crystal clear , for me personally, would be totally unethical. Our journey has yet not even started , and its too hard to contemplate the decisions, we would make in hypothetical situations where ethics are concerned. We acknowledge the fact that , this is not something one can teach or evaluate in current setting . So, that being put aside, there are 2 things we can write about -
First , ethics as function of a software supply chain
Second , ethics pertaining to TenderBullet
We plan to utilize the “Andon Cord” approach as pioneered by Toyota , for managing the software produced for TenderBullet.
Each of the underlying component will be throughly PEN-tested using multiple tools and mechanisms.
We will make use of Spring Cloud contract for Testing API, amoung a pehlotra of other trivial practices .
Tenderbullet would require a certain level of ethical principals to operate , but again this is such a vague mindset. Being aware of Maslow’s theory , it by belief that we would have to take out chance of corruption by stakeholders all together. This is something that requires a detailed exploration , we have only considered obfuscation of Bids as an initial step in this direction.
There is no single standardized blockchain smart contract methodology that can be used as defacto approach from legal prespective. CommonAccord (commonaccord.org) initiative is working to realize this goal.
We are currently been exploring openlaw (openlaw.io) and The Accord Project (https://accordproject.org/) .
We are leaning towards latter , due to 2 reasons ,
first , its engagement with Google Summer of code and
second its openness to any blockchain with particular affinity for Hyperledger fabric (and also use of elegant Behavior driven design approach). (Described the technical aspects in the Appendix section)
Detailed exploration for Security assurance correctness verification, etc , of blockchain smart contracts , is still pending