ONDC gearing up for next phase of growth, formal launch this year: Official, ET Retail
After onboarding over 84,000 sellers, open network for digital commerce (ONDC) is gearing up for the next phase of growth and will be formally launched this year, an official said.
Earlier this week, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal had called a meeting to take stock of the progress on ONDC.
ONDC is an initiative of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. It allows a single platform to access all domains and enables buyers and sellers to be digitally visible and transact through an open network.
It has been touted as a unified payments interface-type protocol that would democratise the ecommerce businesses by onboarding millions of small retailers in the country.
“ONDC will bring about a complete transformation in the ecommerce sector, just like what UPI did to payment systems,” Anurag Jain, the outgoing secretary of Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, told ET. Jain was on Thursday appointed as the secretary for ministry of roads, transport and highways.
Jain said daily transactions on the network have increased to 23,000 per day from just 50 in January.
Jain said the Centre is in talks with the states to facilitate ONDC’s adoption. “Discussions are on with states ,” he said.
ONDC is now focussing on enhancing last-mile adoption to onboard small mom-and-pop shop owners in the hinterland.
Jain said many companies had already been on-boarded on ONDC and discussions are on with more players.
Several companies, including Phonepe, Paytm, Meesho, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, ITC, Snapdeal and Magicpin, and multiple self-help groups and farmer producer organisations have already come on board ONDC.
“Growing transactions have demonstrated the effectiveness of the technology and it should gain critical mass by May or June, after which it would be formally launched,” Jain said, adding that 500,000 orders have been executed on the network so far.
ONDC’s alpha launch was done in five cities–Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Shillong and Coimbatore. Subsequently, a beta version was launched in Bengaluru and Meerut.