Technology for MSMEs: The central authorities’s bold mission Open Network for Digital Commerce’s (ONDC) is all set to scale up aggressively within the subsequent six months. The purpose is to be in over 100 cities and have a number of thousand sellers onboarded on the platform, ONDC’s Chief Business Officer, Shireesh Joshi instructed Financial Express Online.
Currently, ONDC is doing the pilot in six cities, particularly Delhi, Bangalore, Bhopal, Coimbatore, Lucknow and Shillong. “In the next six months, we should be a fairly large and humming network,” he added.
Currently, the mission will not be open to public and is in its last testing part. “It’s the first proof that takes time but once all the testing is done and we have verified that the software is able to handle all the use cases, opening it up to everyone will be relatively straightforward. Right now, don’t think of it as a fully operational network. It is operational, but it is in the final testing phase.” mentioned Joshi. He added that they haven’t zeroed in on particular cities however are speaking to a number of stakeholders.
ONDC has 200 sellers lively on the platform throughout two classes, grocery, and meals and beverage trade.
Sellers can’t onboard the ONDC community straight however should entry it by vendor platforms. Currently, 5 vendor purposes are lively on the community similar to Digiit, Gofrugal, Growth Falcons, eSamudaay and SellerApp. Also, customers should buy these sellers’ merchandise from PayTM and get it delivered. “More buyer, seller and logistics players are building their own apps to integrate with ONDC and will be live on the platform soon,” mentioned Joshi.
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“The overall idea behind ONDC is how do we get every Indian buyer and seller on the platform. Now to achieve that overall goal we have to cover the entire length and breadth of the country from a geography perspective and also the entire gamut of products and services, so eventually, everything will be possible on ONDC,” mentioned Joshi.
An initiative of the Government of India, ONDC is a community based mostly on open protocol that may allow consumers and sellers on completely different purposes to transact with one another. ONDC needs to be for retail what QR code is for funds. The rationale of the bold mission is to democratise e-commerce and provide small companies equal alternatives to get on on-line platforms and develop their enterprise.
Joshi was chatting with Financial Express Online on the sidelines of the Grand Hackathon problem organised in collaboration with NABARD to create digital options to speed up the adoption of e-commerce within the agricultural sector. “As we started engaging with the state governments, we saw that there was a keen interest to promote local farm produce and enable their farmer producer organisations take their programmes live on ONDC,” mentioned Joshi. In the subsequent two to 4 months agriculture produce would be the third class to get lively on ONDC.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”
