PowerChain
Decentralizing the future of power
Created on 2nd November 2025
•
PowerChain
Decentralizing the future of power
The problem PowerChain solves
Problem Statement
Despite India's 2018–19 claim of 100% village electrification, millions in rural and remote areas still face severe and unpredictable electricity outages. In many regions, the power situation remains unstable, opaque, and unequal, with issues extending beyond infrastructure to include corruption and lack of accountability.
Key Issues
-
Frequent and Long Outages:
Rural households often experience 8–18 hours of daily power cuts, sometimes lasting for days. -
False or Ignored Complaints:
Some electricity complaints are marked as resolved without any actual repairs being made. -
Corruption and Delay:
Reports indicate that bribes influence repair priority, while other areas face long delays before issues are addressed. -
Slow and Reactive Dashboards:
Government monitoring systems are often manual, slow, and reactive, providing limited real-time visibility. -
Lack of Citizen Voice:
Complaints from citizens, especially those in rural and remote regions, are often not taken seriously or acted upon in time.
Ground Reality
- Assam and Manipur: Long delays persist in connecting “electrified” villages to consistent power supply.
- Rajasthan (2024, Orange Tree Foundation): Rural households endure an average of 12 hours of power cuts daily.
- 60% of rural complaints take over 6 hours to resolve compared to just 13% in urban areas.
- Delhi: Over 51,958 outages exceeding 5 hours occurred over the last decade, averaging 14 per day.
- Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam: Many regions experience 6–12 hours of power cuts daily.
- NITI Aayog & CEEW (2021): Only 47% of households receive more than 12 hours of power per day.
Why This Matters
Reliable electricity is essential for education, healthcare, agriculture, and livelihoods. Without transparent tracking and citizen participation, power inequality and administrative negligence persist, leaving rural communities at a significant disadvantage.
PowerChain addresses these challenges by creating a decentralized, transparent, and real-time power outage tracking system. It enables both citizens and authorities to verify power availability, monitor complaints, and ensure accountability across regions.
Challenges we ran into
Challenges Faced
As first-year students with no prior experience in backend development, we faced several technical and conceptual challenges during the hackathon.
-
Learning Backend Development from Scratch:
Setting up APIs, databases, and secure communication between systems was completely new to us, and understanding how all the components interact took time. -
Parsing and Structuring JSON Data:
Getting FastAPI to correctly parse and format JSON so that both the blockchain API and PyMongo could work with compatible data structures was confusing at first. -
Understanding Blockchain and Ethereum (Sepolia):
Implementing transactions on the Sepolia Ethereum network was challenging. Concepts like gas, transaction hashes, and interacting with blockchain nodes were difficult to grasp initially. -
CORS and Secure Frontend–Backend Communication:
Allowing the backend to securely connect to the frontend and properly configure CORS headers required extensive debugging and testing. -
Frontend–Backend Integration Bugs:
Integrating the Nuxt frontend with the FastAPI backend caused several unexpected errors, but we managed to resolve them through trial, research, and teamwork. -
Frontend Hosting on Vercel:
Deploying the frontend on Vercel took significant effort due to compatibility issues with the better-sqlite3 dependency, which caused build and runtime errors that required manual fixes.
These challenges were a major learning experience for us as first-year students. We gained valuable exposure to backend systems, blockchain integration, deployment workflows, and full-stack development within a short time frame.
Tracks Applied (2)
Open Innovation
Web3
Technologies used