How tech companies are partnering with millions of mom-and-pop “kirana” stores in India for services like last mile delivery, digital transactions, and more
Avanish Tiwary / KrASIA :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2018, coverage framed India's kirana stores as a competitive threat — Amazon and Walmart's formidable rival offering instant delivery and interest-free credit that e-commerce couldn't match. This 2020 piece marks the pivot point: instead of fighting the corner store, tech companies began recruiting millions of them as partners for last-mile delivery and digital payments.
That partnership logic was soon industrialized. JioMart went further than app integrations, disrupting the salesperson-driven distribution model by giving stores fast deliveries, credit, and training directly, while ONDC emerged as a state-backed attempt to let small retailers compete against rapid grocery delivery startups.
First-order effects
- Kirana stores gain delivery, payments, and credit capabilities they could never build alone, while platforms like JioMart acquire a physical fulfillment network without owning a single storefront.
Second-order effects
- Quick commerce players Zepto, Blinkit, and Swiggy's Instamart respond by expanding beyond groceries into an important distribution channel for food brands, competing on discounts and delivery speed against the very stores their rivals partnered with.
Third-order effects
- The squeeze is already visible: roughly 200,000 kirana stores closed in a single year as they struggled to match quick-commerce discounting (per Rest of World), suggesting partnership offers access but not protection — and pushing policy answers like ONDC toward becoming the structural counterweight.
The trend: Indian retail is consolidating around platform intermediaries that simultaneously enlist kirana stores as partners and undercut them with quick-commerce alternatives, leaving state-built networks like ONDC as the small merchant's remaining lever.