Need to broaden participation to expand digital commerce in India: ONDC

The country needs wider participation of buyers and sellers to expand digital commerce in the next few years, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) CEO T Koshy said on Tuesday.

"If you look at today's digital commerce in the country, it is limited to 10 per cent and just 2-3 per cent on the buyer side, so we need to broaden and expand the participation so that the current levels can go up to 25-30 per cent in the next few years.

"We are working in each of the segments to understand the challenges and building mechanisms to address them and to enable broad-based participation," Koshy said while speaking at the 3-day 'Global Fintech Fest 2023' that began on Tuesday.

Digital commerce is just starting in the country. There are huge challenges ahead, and soon, there will be domains that will enable international transactions for people to buy from the India network, he added.

"The key thing is while we are doing all this technology enabling, we have to understand that there is a need for larger participation of buyers and sellers. We need to have a lot of developmental work to encourage small and micro enterprises to participate and to benefit from it," the CEO noted.

So, the biggest initiative is that ONDC is working with agencies like the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), NABARD, many philanthropic organisations, small and medium enterprises and the agriculture ministry, among others.

"We are working with a variety of enterprises, who all have an ecosystem of entities...and we feel that it has enormous growth potential in a few years," he added.