Image Courtesy: CNBC TV18

Nandan Nilekani, the head of Infosys and the creative mind behind the Aadhar and UPI services, has taken up a new enterprise, namely the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), with the goal of providing a local alternative to online shopping portals with several unique features.

Not only does the ONDC platform provide the seamless shopping experience that we have come to expect online, but it also enables small and large market entities to have equal opportunities to be discovered online. Further, the ONDC system supports rapid scaling up of products and services and goes the extra step to provide credit and financing solutions to all e-commerce participants.

Can the ONDC model be applied to other domains? As of March 2024, the platform has successfully extended its services to include agricultural commerce, facilitating the trade of 3100 items among 5630 agricultural groups across multiple states.

ONDC’s success and reliability have expanded their reach to auxiliary service providers worldwide. For instance, San Francisco based business messaging platform Gupshup launched a multi-lingual Whatsapp chatbot on ONDC just days ago, allowing users to browse and purchase products without having to download additional mobile apps. EaseMyTrip, the online flight portal, will also be joining the open, inclusive and competitive digital commerce ecosystem. 

With so many avenues of application, what are some of the other domains in which participants could take advantage of the ONDC system that is already in place or develop their own version of the ONDC model? 

Magazines will now be offering subscriptions through ONDC. Flipkart has signed up to make food deliveries via ONDC.    

Could Ed-Tech be organised into a portal in a manner akin to ONDC’s e-commerce system? Is there scope for a skill-and-knowledge-based platform organised around senior citizens (say, those who are superannuated) enabling them to share and/or monetize their expertise? The ONDC model and its potential applicability to a variety of domains would make for an interesting series of studies.

 


(This article was last updated on July 2, 2024.)

Monika Krishan, Senior Fellow

Views expressed by the author are personal and need not reflect or represent the views of the Centre for Public Policy Research.

 

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Dr Monika Krishan's academic background includes a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Her research interests include image processing, psychovisual perception of textures, perception of animacy, goal based inference, perception of uncertainty and invariance detection in visual and non-visual domains. Areas of study also include the impact of artificial intelligence devices on human cognition from the developmental stages of the human brain, through adulthood, all the way through the aging process, and the resulting impact on the socio-cognitive health of society. She has worked on several projects on the cognitive aspects of the use and misuse of technology in social and antisocial contexts at SERC, IISc as well as the development of interactive graphics for Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems at Siemens. She is a member of Ohio University’s Consortium for the Advancement of Cognitive Science. She has offered services at economically challenged schools and hospitals for a number of years and continues to be an active community volunteer in the field of education and mental health

Dr Monika Krishan
Dr Monika Krishan
Dr Monika Krishan's academic background includes a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Her research interests include image processing, psychovisual perception of textures, perception of animacy, goal based inference, perception of uncertainty and invariance detection in visual and non-visual domains. Areas of study also include the impact of artificial intelligence devices on human cognition from the developmental stages of the human brain, through adulthood, all the way through the aging process, and the resulting impact on the socio-cognitive health of society. She has worked on several projects on the cognitive aspects of the use and misuse of technology in social and antisocial contexts at SERC, IISc as well as the development of interactive graphics for Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems at Siemens. She is a member of Ohio University’s Consortium for the Advancement of Cognitive Science. She has offered services at economically challenged schools and hospitals for a number of years and continues to be an active community volunteer in the field of education and mental health
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