Tech industry veteran Nandan Nilekani on Tuesday said India will witness "significant economic activity" over the next 10 years on the back of open network for digital commerce (ONDC), record aggregating system and Central Government measures such as GST, FAStag and e-way bills.
While speaking at the 7th edition of the Global Technology Summit organised by Carnegie India, the Infosys Technologies cofounder and non-executive chairman said, "...there are three big things coming today, which will over the next decade have more of an impact (on India). I believe in the next 10 years India is going to see significant economic activity which is broad based, inclusive and democratised."
The government is running a pilot of ONDC, a Unified Payments Interface-type protocol, where all e-commerce ecosystem players will facilitate online purchase of goods and services at competitive prices, thereby reducing cost burden on sellers and consumers.
Nilekani further said the first is, ONDC second is account aggregator framework and the transformation happening in the logistics sector due to government initiatives like GST, Fastag and the e-way bill.
The tech industry veteran said he expects the ONDC to begin soon.
ONDC, believed to be a 'massive game-changing technology', will allow the commerce business to be disintegrated for millions of small suppliers to sell on the network, for millions of small retailers to participate as small sellers on the platform to really turbocharge hyper-local commerce making their businesses more inclusive.
Secondly, account aggregator network which again fundamentally is an idea that data should ultimately be used by people who generate the data and therefore individuals, small businesses can use the data to get access to multiple services like credit and so forth.
This record aggregating system is also a business for India's data empowerment architecture. It has a unique installation called consent manager.
"A consent manager on your behalf gets your data from different providers and provides it further for different benefits. For example, a small business can use his consent manager get his GST details, get bank statement from the bank, get tax status from the income tax system and give it in a secure manner to lender who can then take a decision to give credit. All this is fundamentally going to democratise lending and other financial services," the Chairman noted.
Nilekani added, there is transformation happening in the logistics sector due to government initiatives such as GST, FAStag and e-way bill. All these have simplified the movement of goods and vehicles on the highways. The government has many plans to build multi-modal parks, all this will help reduce logistics cost.
Further, a variety of startup innovators, local delivery and intercity delivery are going to change that moment and delivery of goods, he stated.
Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal had earlier said that the ONDC initiative will help bring down costs and also help save millions of jobs and millions of small shops all across the country.
