Local governments typically finance their infrastructure needs through leveraging their assets through auctions. Though auctions are popular in the sale and lease of government land world over, emerging economies are hampered by the lack of price and process transparency along with regulatory capture by private agents. Our primary research goal is to examine whether governments in emerging economies can increase revenues by selling land through e-auctions (anonymous auctions conduced online over a period of time) rather than through traditional “physical place” auctions. Using a quasi-natural experiment on land auctions of residential plots in the city of Bengaluru, India, we find that e-auctions have better differences in price discovery, transparency and lesser collusive behaviour of market participants and draw implications on whether technology can overcome systemic issues prevalent in developing economies.