Keeping pace with ONDC’s great reception post its launch in April 2022, CEO T Koshy recently stated that ONDC would be expanded to cover up to 75-100 new towns and cities. The roaring reception of ONDC by business circles and great interest shown by startups and investors in this new initiative has sparked a flurry of activity aimed at exploration and utilization of this new public digital good. As per the official statement, Mr. Koshy said that ONDC would be opened to newer geographical locations based on whether the number of sellers for that area exceeds a certain predefined threshold.
Agreeing with Mr. Koshy’s statement is Union Minister for Consumer Affairs, Piyush Goyal, who noted that by September, ONDC network would have an initial presence in over 75-100 towns and cities across the country, allowing it the flexibility and scalability to open to the general public at large. Already, about 7 private companies have functional ONDC-compatible applications with several others at different stages in terms of integration towards the platform, and thus, it is expected that the ONDC platform will see an exponential growth over the next coming years. With this rapid expansion of ONDC, we can expect a similar ramping up of opportunities for smaller e-commerce and logistics startups across the country with fundamental transformation heralded into a sector that has long been monopolized by a few large platforms.
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