India's ONDC has been in operation for one year. Here is a status update.

Growth of the platform: from 30 transactions to 600 each day

The platform, which was designed to increase customer accessibility and inclusion in e-commerce, has, according to official statements, "achieved major milestones in the past few months."

On April 6, joint secretary, DPIIT, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Sanjiv, and ONDC CEO T Koshy spoke at a press conference in Delhi. They said that the platform had been able to attract 37 network participants, ranging from market leaders to up-and-coming Indian startups, with companies like PhonePe, Hindustan Unilever, and ITC joining as sellers.

ONDC Network Policy Introduction

A non-profit organization called The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is in charge of democratizing digital commerce in India. The platform-model has historically been used in e-commerce. In this approach, the platform, which serves as the central entity, manages every aspect of the value chain, including vendor onboarding, order flow management, fulfilment and logistics, payment collection, complaint resolution, and client acquisition. As a result, the platform sets the ground rules for interactions between buyers, sellers, and all other parties in a given transaction. As a result, a contract between the central platform and the buyer, seller, and all auxiliary services (such as suppliers of logistics services and payment aggregators) exists.

The ONDC Network, in contrast, is decentralized and many e-commerce-related tasks are unbundled. The legal ties between network participants, buyers, and sellers are a little more complicated than in the platform model because there is no central platform.

What rules apply to transactions on the ONDC Network?

• The rules of the sale must be followed in every single transaction, and the invoice is the means through which the seller transfers ownership of the products to the buyer.
• Both the Buyer and the Seller are in a continuing legal relationship with their respective apps (the Buyer App and the Seller App).
• A Seller and Buyer app, or a Buyer and Seller app, have no direct connection to one another.
• Through the Network Participant Agreement and ONDC Network Policy, the Buyer App and Seller App are only permanently bound by ONDC.
• Both the Buyer App and the Seller App are independent from one another legally. In order to ease a transaction between a Buyer and Seller, a Transaction-level Contract between them instantly establishes a legal connection. The Transaction-level Contract's specifics will shortly be posted on the internet by ONDC.

The collection of all the guidelines produced by ONDC that control how the ONDC Network functions is referred to as "ONDC Network Policy." The terms of any given transaction on the ONDC Network are defined by the ONDC Network Policy, the ONDC Network Participant Agreement, and the Transactional Documents (i.e., the transaction-level contract executed through the ONDC Protocol).