Government of India backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), that was built to break the monopoly of global e-commerce giants in India, has been ramping up on its features and services in order to reach a wider audience and gain deeper penetration into the tier 2 cities.
The network has surpassed 100 million transactions over the past 18 months and aims to facilitate around 40 million monthly transactions by FY25. In the last year, several companies like Ola, Snapdeal Paytm, Magicpin, Uber, and Namma Yatri have joined the platform. Recently, Porter and EaseMyTrip were also onboarded, and discussions are underway to introduce insurance and mutual fund products within the next two months.
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In a recent development, ONDC has partnered with another government of India backed initiative, Bhashini, to launch ‘Saarthi’, a reference B2B app to help its businesses create a customised experience for multilingual customers. The application currently supports Hindi, English, Marathi, Bangla and Tamil and is working on to provide 22 languages soon.
ONDC’s chief executive officer T Koshy told Outlook Business that ONDC wants to diversify digital commerce and reach out to the last mile buyer and seller. “Knowing where to find ONDC is still a challenge for a few people, hence we decided to come up with an app that helps the customer discover the convenient app to make their purchase,”
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In other developments, ONDC has recently appointed former chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) R S Sharma as its non-executive chairman. Sharma will help the network in scaling up its adoption of the domestic and overseas market.
