Union Minister Piyush Goyal promotes ONDC to small traders

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Jun 6, 2022

Union Minister Piyush Goyal is promoting the government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce to small traders and believes that enabling traders to all operate on a common platform will democratise e-commerce in India. 

The government’s ONDC will help to protect the livelihoods of small traders, Goyal told reporters on June 3, TNN reported. The government launched the pilot phase of ONDC on April 29 in five cities and aims to expand it across the country in the future. ONDC is a set of standards which can be voluntarily adopted by sellers, logistics providers, or payment gateways.

“ONDC will provide a huge number of choices to consumers,” said Goyal, TNN reported. “In a way, it is a medium to democratise e-commerce. It will provide equal opportunities to sell products and all consumers will get [a] good number of choices.”

Goyal stated that it is important to ensure that large e-commerce firms do not dominate the market to the detriment of small businesses as he believes they have done in the US. This has led to large scale unemployment there, he stated. The Confederation of All India Traders has however argued for several years that this has already occurred in India and has accused US-owned Flipkart and Amazon of monopolising the Indian e-commerce market.