ONDC senior vice president for mobility Nitin Nair told ET among the customer-facing buyer apps currently live on ONDC, Paytm is likely to be the first to offer mobility services which also has groceries, food and beverages, beauty and personal care, and electronics categories that have gone live. Paytm did not respond to ET’s queries.
ONDC is also in talks with the other buyer apps to introduce mobility as a category. In the next six months, ONDC is planning to enter several metro and tier 2 cities, Nair said at a press conference in Bengaluru.
ONDC is also going to introduce business-to-business e-commerce transactions in early April, which is currently limited to business-to-customer e-commerce transactions, ONDC chief executive T Koshy said.
The open source app currently clocks nearly one lakh weekly trips. Koshy said it helps drivers and service providers to earn a livelihood not beholden to platform interests. What UPI and NPCI did to digital payments, ONDC intends to do for mobility, he said.
“One of the challenges of existing platforms is that each of them have their own proprietary technology which means that you are part of the walled garden,” said Koshy. “If you are in one then you cannot be in another unless you get integrated with two of them. That is why you see many merchants and drivers getting integrated with two platforms. But the beauty of the open network is that you can be anywhere and you would be visible.”
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Rudramurthy TM, General Secretary of the Auto-Rickshaw Drivers’ Union (ARDU), told ET that the app does not penalise drivers for cancellation or delays. “Juspay created an app and gave us full autonomy. Drivers are responsible for bringing in customers and promoting the app,” he added. ARDU is one of the first auto rickshaw unions approached by Namma Yatri to be onboarded to the app.Customer reviews, however, are mixed. Many commuters have complained that the drivers overcharge and there are a lot of cancellations. They have also raised issues like lack of a destination change option similar to the one in Ola and Uber.
ET reported on March 18 that the builder of the auto rickshaw booking mobile application Namma Yatri is seeking public participation to help it match the service and user experience offered by tech companies like Ola, Uber and Rapido.
Juspay Technologies is seeking participation from coders, policymakers and other stakeholders to better the product it has developed for Bengaluru’s ARDU. The software, data, analytics and the future roadmap of the open mobility project are available for the public to see.
ONDC, Beckn and Namma Yatri have announced a city-wide hackathon for citizens to participate and contribute towards mobility solutions. This event is open between March 23 and April 9, 2023 and aims to attract innovative sustainable mobility solutions.
Currently in beta-testing mode in 15 cities, ONDC is targeting 5,000 transactions a day by the end of March from the current 200, Koshy had previously said. As many as 35 apps are live with ONDC and more than 400 are being integrated.
More than 18,000 merchants across product categories and over 150 towns and cities live on ONDC. The network first piloted in Delhi, Shillong, Coimbatore, Bhopal, Bengaluru and Lucknow.
Sellers, buyers and logistics service providers who are a part of the network include e-commerce firms like Meesho and Craftsvilla, delivery firms like Delhivery, and Dunzo, and finance firms like Paytm and PhonePe.s
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