Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, headed the government program of creating biometric identification for the total population of our country. The 66-year-old billionaire is now helping our prime minister Shri Narendra Modi build an open technology network that will help small merchants in India to level up in the retail market game, which is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2025.
This open technology network aims to create a free-to-access online system where traders and consumers can sell and purchase anything from a detergent bar to an airplane ticket. But the real intention is to limit the powers of Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. They have dominated the nation's retail market by providing big discounts, which have hurt millions of local merchants and Kirana stores.
The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) was formed to address this issue. In this world's first attempt, the Indian government will create an eCommerce ecosystem that will help small and medium merchants reach the big giants' economic scale. Sitting in his private office, Mr. Nandan Nilekani commented that the ONDC initiative is an idea whose time has come. He further said that we all owe the small sellers to show an easy way to participate in the latest high-growth area of digital commerce.
In the early phase, this government-owned network will be rolled out next month to a few selected users in five cities. Reacting to this news, an Amazon spokesperson said that they are trying to understand the system better; however, there is no statement from Flipkart.
Previously, Mr. Nandan Nilekani helped the Indian government introduce the backbone of today's payment system called UPI (Unified Payment Interface). He was hired as an adviser to ONDC last year, but his biggest challenge will be making the network achieve its targets as Flipkart and Amazon have dominated the market due to their tried and tested technology which lures merchants to join their platforms.
Anil Kumar, CEO of Redseer Management Consulting Pvt., commented that the government needs to build something better or comparable to outperform the big players. He further added that everything depends on the network attracting a large number of buyers, sellers, payment logistics, warehousing providers, etc. Mr. Kumar also said that the major challenge would be to standardize the overall experience of returns and refunds for buyers and sellers and create an open network where everyone wins.
Pavankumar Baboori is an experienced Sr. Content Analyst who improves the workflow by identifying and resolving the content development gap. He works closely with the marketing team to deploy strategies for improving brand awareness, website traffic, search engine ranking, and lead generation activities. He gauges up marketing channels for the real digital transformations.
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