Goyal’s suggestions came during his meeting with various industry stakeholders to review the progress of the initiative. He also stressed that it must work with industry associations to bring faster adoption to the network.
Thampy Koshy, chief executive at ONDC, told ET on Friday that over 150 entities have signed up with the network to integrate their apps, and all of them will be going live in the upcoming months.
Seven companies — one buyer-side app (), five seller-side apps (GoFrugal, Seller App, Growth Falcon, eSamudaay, and Digiit), and one logistics service provider app (LoadShare) — have adopted ONDC protocols and built their own ONDC-compatible apps.
These apps have successfully completed cascaded transactions across the ONDC network during the pilot phase in five designated cities — Bengaluru, New Delhi, Bhopal, Shillong, and Coimbatore — in the grocery, and food and beverages segments.
Nandan Nilekani, founding member of UIDAI and key personnel behind ONDC; Adil Zainulbhai, chairman Quality Council of India; Anurag Jain, secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT); R S Sharma, CEO, NHA; Suresh Sethi, CEO NSDL e-Gov; Dilip Asbe CEO, NPCI; Praveen Khandelwal, secretary-general of CAIT; K Rajagopalan, CEO RAI; Arvind Gupta, cofounder & head, Digital India Foundation; Anjali Bansal, founder, Avaana Capital and Anil Agrawal, additional secretary, DPIIT attended the meeting.
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The meeting reviewed the status of the
pilot launched on April 29 and discussed plans for a faster rollout of the ONDC platform to traders, categories of goods, geographies, and companies.
“So, this is the advisory council where ONDC gave an update and explained how it will be going forward in the strategic directions,” Koshy told ET. “Some of the things we discussed were network expansion strategy, network governance strategy, network governance upgrade strategy, among others.”
Goyal said the ONDC network needs to make a robust policy framework to build trust within the network. The National Consumer Helpline records show major grievances of consumers are related to the delivery of wrong, defective and/or damaged products, non-delivery or delayed delivery, no refunds, and inadequacy in services promised. All these issues must be addressed effectively, he said.
Koshy said most seller-side apps are operating in the food and grocery space.
“So, we want to ensure that even the smallest platforms can work with the most difficult domain, which is grocery and food. Once that is there, the rest are all relatively less complex,” he noted.
ONDC, which is still at a nascent stage, is being pitched as a solution to break the dominance of large e-commerce firms in India such as Walmart-owned Flipkart, Amazon, and others.
ET reported on May 12 that Flipkart, Amazon, and
are likely to be part of the network. The core aim of ONDC is to enable e-commerce for small sellers and businesses. Parallels have been drawn with the government’s United Payment Interface (UPI) for digital payments, referring to its ability to do something similar for e-commerce firms.
ONDC has plans to scale its presence to about 100 cities by August and will also be opened to the wider public in five cities — Bengaluru, New Delhi, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong — where the pilot is underway.
