A look at India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which could help the country's mom-and-pop retailers compete against rapid grocery delivery startups
Varsha Bansal / TIME :
Context & Ripple Effects
ONDC arrives as a counterweight to a decade of platform consolidation in Indian retail. Tech companies had already been partnering with millions of kirana stores for last-mile delivery and digital payments — but on the platforms' terms. By mid-2022, even the giants were hedging: Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance Retail were reported to be in talks to join the open network rather than fight it.
This TIME explainer lands just before ONDC's scale-up phase — the nonprofit later ran trials across more than 85 cities including Bengaluru after raising $22M, and Amazon moved from talks to committing its logistics network and SaaS tools to the network. The open question the piece poses is whether protocol-level openness can actually shift share, not just participation.
First-order effects
- Mom-and-pop retailers gain a way to be discoverable and transactable outside any single app's walled catalog, directly challenging the rapid grocery delivery startups whose speed advantage depends on controlling the storefront.
- Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance Retail face a choice between staying out of a government-backed network that could route around them or joining it — and the reporting shows them leaning toward joining.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent platforms respond by absorbing the standard rather than resisting it: Amazon's plan to integrate its logistics network and SaaS tools into ONDC means the network's neutrality gets tested by the very players it was designed to check.
- Rapid-delivery players like Zomato and Swiggy see their near-duopoly contested at the protocol layer, where competition shifts from discount-funded apps to whoever aggregates demand across the open network.
Third-order effects
- The later record is cautionary: by 2025 ONDC had struggled to break the Zomato–Swiggy near-duopoly after cutting back on discounts, suggesting open protocols lower barriers to entry but don't by themselves overcome consumer habits and subsidy-driven loyalty.
- If the pattern holds, state-built interoperability layers become a recurring regulatory instrument in Indian digital markets — with success measured less by dethroning incumbents than by keeping the infrastructure contestable.
The trend: Governments are building open commerce protocols to unbundle platform dominance, but ONDC's trajectory shows interoperability alone rarely displaces entrenched delivery duopolies.