Opening up a contemporary entrance of crackdown on giant e-commerce platforms, the Centre has moved forward with its plans for the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) by forming an advisory council comprising 9 members together with National Health Authority CEO RS Sharma and Infosys non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani. Through the ONDC, the federal government is seeking to standardise protocols for onboarding stakeholders reminiscent of sellers on e-marketplaces.
In an order on Monday, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) stated that the ONDC “aims at promoting open networks developed on open-sourced methodology, using open specifications and open network protocols, independent on any specific platform. ONDC is expected to digitise the entire value chain, standardise operations, promote inclusion of suppliers, derive efficiency in logistics and enhance value for consumers”.
This has come at a time the federal government is already partaking with main foreign-funded on-line marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart over the draft Consumer Protection (E-commerce) Rules, which the Consumer Affairs Ministry revealed final month.
According to business executives, the implementation of ONDC, which is anticipated to be on the strains of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) may carry numerous operational features put in place by e-commerce platforms on to the identical degree. These embody processes reminiscent of vendor onboarding, vendor discovery, worth discovery and product cataloguing. One govt stated that if mandated, this may very well be problematic for bigger e-commerce corporations, which have proprietary processes in these features.
In addition to Sharma and Nilekani, different members on the advisory council are Quality Control of India Chairman Adil Zainulbhai, Avaana Capital Founder Anjali Bansal, Digital India Foundation Co-Founder Arvind Gupta, National Payments Corporation India CEO Dilip Asbe, National Security Depository MD Suresh Sethi, CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal, and Retailers Association of India CEO Kumar Rajagopalan. In the order, the DPIIT famous that it has been determined to represent an advisory council to advise the federal government on measures wanted to design and speed up the adoption of ONDC.
Late final 12 months, the DPIIT had fashioned an intra-governmental committee comprising representatives from Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Niti Aayog, Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises, Government e-Marketplace, National Payments Corporation of India, and National Security Depository Ltd as members.
