In June of 2022, the newly created Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) began working with National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in order to promote and encourage the adoption of ecommerce in the agricultural sector. As part of this newly launched initiative, ONDC and NABARD have jointly launched the NABARD-ONDC Grand Challenge, aiming to stimulate product development in the agricultural e-commerce sector by building market infrastructure and linkages between the various players and the farming cooperatives in the country. The aim of the project is to stimulate innovation in order to aid adoption of e-commerce facilities in the agricultural sector in order to boost farmer incomes.

The hackathon has a total of 400 registered organizations of which 250 are agri-tech related startups while the remainder are non-agritech related startups. Some prominent names in the agritech space include NinjaKart, John Deere and Agmart among others, whereas in the non-agritech space, some of the featured names were Tata Cummins, Zoho and ThoughtWorks among others. The challenges posed in the hackathon were twofold – firstly, to create a system or mechanism in order to onboard existing e-commerce enterprises into ONDC’s protocol and secondly, to create solutions that would drive engagement and adoption of the network among new players. 

Being one of the earliest investors in ONDC, NABARD is especially interested in the development of programmatic approaches to further rural technological development and innovation in order to provide them with the opportunities to experiment with launching themselves on ONDC’s network. By means of this hackathon, NABARD is looking to identify players with solutions to bridge the gap between farming producers organizations and cooperatives and the potential of decentralized platform-agnostic ecommerce as provided by ONDC, and promises to provide them with both incubator and accelerator support along with initial funding to kickstart the enterprise. 

The success of solutions from this hackathon also promises to herald similar such events with support from other organizations and ministries from the Government of India and also with multiple state governments. ONDC CEO T Koshy has expressed optimism in this regard and has stated his belief that such initiatives with their unique problem statements, will produce solutions that will then be scaled into monetizable businesses, capable of building associations with other enterprises while empowering small and medium enterprises across the country.

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