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.