Podcasts about ondc

In today's episode on 5th May 2025, we look at how far ONDC has come since it began and what went wrong with the food delivery revolution it promised.

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, Apple ramps up manufacturing in India with Foxconn and Tata Electronics leading the charge. We dive into why the National Restaurant Association has paused onboarding to ONDC amid leadership churn. Plus, Ather Energy's IPO sees full subscription, startup valuations take a hit with down rounds making a return. Tune in for latest updates on tech and startup world.

In today's episode, SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey opens up on IPO reforms, investor protection, and the future of market regulations. We also decode Apple's major production shift to India, the return of Mukesh Ambani to the $100 billion club, and Coldplay's surprising ₹641 crore economic impact. Plus, updates on US-India trade talks and NRAI's ONDC retreat. All this and more in today's episode.

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, we dive into the UPI outage over the weekend, exploring the root cause and the NPCI's response. We also discuss ONDC's declining retail share and its shift towards mobility. Plus, Andhra Pradesh's penny land deal with TCS and Lendingkart's leadership shake-up as they appoint a new CEO. Lastly, we explore Bezu's AI companions providing emotional support to users. Tune in for the latest in tech and startup news!

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, ONDC CEO Thampy Koshy resigns, marking a major leadership shakeup at India's e-commerce disruptor. TCS delivers a lower-than-expected results with dip in net profit, Wakefit gears up for a Rs 2,000 crore IPO, joining the wave of startups eyeing public markets. Meanwhile, Flipkart Minutes plans to scale quick commerce with 800 dark stores by 2025. Tune in for the top tech and startup stories.

In today's Tech3 episode, we unpack the government's new Rs 1,500 crore UPI incentive and its impact on Fintech, Google's record-breaking $32 billion acquisition of cloud security startup Wiz and how it is making waves, ONDC's rise, AI-powered tools from Adobe, plus  Icertis' fresh funding round. Tune in for all this and more, every Monday to Friday.

 | Episode #44 Reach more customers through ONDC Ft. Nilay Patel, Founder – Easy Pay Welcome back to MSME TALK® Brand Bite. MSME TALK® Brand Bite brings brands products, services showcase relevant for Micro enterprises, SMEs, startups, businesses to scale up and build long-lasting Businesses. Join Whatsapp  Subscribe to MSME TALK® Newsletter and Alerts List your Product, Services on MSME TALK® ONDC is creating ripples in the digital discovery of products and is already doing crore of transactions. MSME Sellers cannot miss this. This episode on ONDC highlights how MSME sellers can unlock new growth opportunities by connecting with a broader customer base and how Easy Pay can help you in this process. Sections  00:00:00 Episode Content ahead and Easypay Intro  00:01:30 About Easy Pay background & role in serving 2.5 million MSMEs so far 00:03:40 Founders Background 00:04:52 Understanding ONDC for Sellers 00:08:30 ONDC vs Existing dominant Ecommerce Platforms 00:11:38 Benefits for Sellers on ONDC  00:13:01 Cost Advantages of ONDC00:15:20 What about advertisement cost to rank higher?  00:16:41 Interoperability Explained00:19:10 How Artisans are using ONDC 00:19:55Discovery in hyperlocal vs Entire country works on ONDC ?00:22:46 Which Businesses should register on ONDC 00:24:00 Is OTT also there on ONDC? 00:24:30 Frauds, Transparency, Fair Practices?  00:27:09 Role of Easy Pay in ONDC00:28:50 Different TSPs on ONDC  00:29:40 Advantages for MSMEs Sellers by using Easy Pay as ONDC onboarding platform 00:32:55 Onboarding Process for MSMEs 00:34:10 Support System for MSMEs00:38:00 Current statistics of ONDC  00:40:30 Logistics and other Collaboration 00:42:00 Future of ONDC 00:43:40 Fastest Way to Onboard with Easy Pay00:44:50 What's happening at Nilays home ?00:48:45 Message for Audience  MSME TALK, brings relevant and valuable industry insights, informative topics, value-added content, and showcases of products and services for MSMEs and startups.  MSMEs & startups are looking for various kinds of supports & upgrade. Are you a Product, Service Provider, Expert, Advisor, Consultant, Mentor for MSMEs/Startups? Reach out to MSME TALK to list your business. Fill the form to help us reach out to you. Hey MSME TALK listeners! Hope you have not missed subscribing to our newsletter for the latest news, blogs, and podcast updates. We don't spam your inbox , hence we have highest rate of letter opening in Industry. Subscribe here for Newsletter. MSME TALK Podcast enters Peak Ranking Chart of 20+ Countries in the Apple Podcast Country Entrepreneurship Category. WhatsApp : Send hi - https://wa.me/918097665085 LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Twitter Website Contact us : connect@msmetalk.comClick to All Social Media , Podcast etc links at one place Please give your rating and reviews on apple podcast or Spotify

We've unlocked this episode for our Basic and Free subscribers for a limited time. Listen to it on your favourite streaming platform for a limited time.The government has played a pivotal role in establishing and promoting Digital Public Goods(DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure(DPI) in the past decade and a half, and there have been few which have been integral in our daily lives in more ways than one.The reason why these solutions exist is plain and simple: There emerged companies which disrupted the landscape of finance, commerce, mobility and a whole lot of other aspects of our lives, but as they gained prominence they also started to play by their own rules.The regulator was not able to act fast enough in most cases to keep things in check. So the government intervened and helped establish and promote solutions which would keep things in check and protect the interests of all the parties involved.Some solutions literally changed the way our day to day lives are, and created businesses which are built on top of these solutions. Think UPI, ONDC or Bharat Connect(formerly known as Bharat Bill Payment System).In addition to creating and shaping these systems or frameworks or protocols, these government-backed players or GBPs, as we referred to them in this episode, also became a competitor on what they had helped build, which begs the question: what kind of system does this shape up to be?In episode 15 of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down with Anupam Manur, Professor of Economics at The Takshashila Institution, to break down the interventionist solutions championed by the government. From UPI and ONDC to the Unified Lending InterfaceEpisodes referenced:Google Pay: Big. Successful. VulnerableStories referenced:You need to download Digiyatra again. But it's less about a tech upgrade and more about a scamRBI is competing with its regulated entities — and killing competitionThis episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and tell us what you think of the show.Write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com, and tell us what you thought of the episode.

We've unlocked this episode for our Basic and Free subscribers for a limited time. Listen to it on your favourite streaming platform for a limited time.Ola and Uber are in a “late-stage duopoly”.After spending billions and billions of dollars, they have finally secured pole positions in ride-sharing in India.Both of these companies together control 70% of the market and they have created network effects that make it much harder for anyone to enter and compete with them.However, this particular situation is facing some new challenges and just like how Uber and Ola conquered city after city using a disruptive model and technology, the same thing threatens to happen to them.Ola and Uber are facing structural disruptions from multiple fronts in India.In today's episode, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar try to answer how the disruptors are getting disrupted by upstarts who are coming in with both business model innovation and newer fleets which offer a significantly better experience, which was the original promise of Ola and Uber as well.So what is the next stage of disruption in ride-hailing look like in India? Is it EV fleets? Is it democratized tech-enabler platforms like ONDC which enables platforms like Nammayatri? Are we looking at the return of local taxi operators? And most importantly, what should Ola and Uber do to defend their position as new incentive models are introduced for both drivers and passengers?Welcome to episode 14 of Two by Two.Joining the hosts for the discussion are Nilesh Sangoi, CIO of Fincare Small Finance Bank, previously CEO of Meru Cabs; Pradeep Puranam, Head of Revenue and Operations at Yulu, ex-Udaan and -Uber; and returning guest Professor Srinivasan R, who teaches Strategy at IIM Bangalore.Episode referenced:Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes Flipkart?Stories referenced:Rapido rips up the Uber-Ola playbook for cabsThis episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and tell us what you think of the show.Write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com, and tell us what you thought of the episode.

What happens when the government plays the role of regulator, policymaker, and operator?The government has played a pivotal role in establishing and promoting Digital Public Goods(DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure(DPI) in the past decade and a half, and there have been few which have been integral in our daily lives in more ways than one.The reason why these solutions exist is plain and simple: There emerged companies which disrupted the landscape of finance, commerce, mobility and a whole lot of other aspects of our lives, but as they gained prominence they also started to play by their own rules.The regulator was not able to act fast enough in most cases to keep things in check. So the government intervened and helped establish and promote solutions which would keep things in check and protect the interests of all the parties involved.Some solutions literally changed the way our day to day lives are, and created businesses which are built on top of these solutions. Think UPI, ONDC or Bharat Connect(formerly known as Bharat Bill Payment System).In addition to creating and shaping these systems or frameworks or protocols these Government-Backed Players or GBPs, as we referred to them in this episode also became a competitor on what they had helped build, which begs the question what kind of system does this shape up to be?In episode 15 of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down with Anupam Manur, Professor of Economics at The Takshashila Institution, to break down the interventionist solutions championed by the government. From UPI and ONDC to the Unified Lending InterfaceTwo by Two is also a newsletter, where every Friday short storified version of the latest episode is sent out to subscribers for free. You can sign up for the Two by Two Newsletter here.This is a short 'highlights only' episode of a 90 minute long discussion. The full episode is available to Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple Podcasts via a standalone subscription.Episodes referenced:Google Pay: Big. Successful. VulnerableStories referenced:You need to download Digiyatra again. But it's less about a tech upgrade and more about a scamRBI is competing with its regulated entities — and killing competitionThis episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and tell us what you think of the show.Write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com, and tell us what you thought of the episode.

Ola and Uber are in a “late stage duopoly”.After spending billions and billions of dollars, they have finally secured pole positions in ride sharing in India.Both of these companies together control 70% of the market and they have created network effects that make it much harder for anyone to enter and compete with them.However, this particular situation is facing some new challenges and just like how Uber and Ola conquered city after city using a disruptive model and technology, the same thing threatens to happen to them.Ola and Uber are facing structural disruptions from multiple fronts in India.And in today's episode hosts, Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar try to answer how the disruptors are getting disrupted by upstarts who are coming in with both business model innovation and newer fleets which offer a significantly better experience, which was the original promise of Ola and Uber as well.So what is the next stage of disruption in ride-hailing look like in India? Is it EV fleets? Is it democratized tech-enabler platforms like ONDC which enables platforms like Nammayatri? Are we looking at the return of local taxi operators? And most importantly, what should Ola and Uber do to defend their position as new incentive models are introduced for both drivers and passengers?Welcome to episode 14 of Two by Two.Joining the hosts for the discussion are Nilesh Sangoi, CIO of Fincare Small Finance Bank, previously CEO of Meru Cabs; Pradeep Puranam, Head of Revenue and Operations at Yulu, ex-Udaan and -Uber; and returning guest Professor Srinivasan R, who teaches Strategy at IIM Bangalore.Two by Two is also a newsletter, where every Friday a short storified version of the latest episode is sent out to subscribers for free. You can sign up for the Two by Two Newsletter here.(Listen to the free highlights only episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts)Episodes referenced:Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes Flipkart?Stories referenced:Rapido rips up the Uber-Ola playbook for cabsThis episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and tell us what you think of the show.Write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com, and tell us what you thought of the episode.

Exactly a year ago, ONDC, the government-backed, open-source commerce network, was launched nationwide. Its twofold purpose: to onboard small sellers who couldn't afford to be on the platforms of e-commerce giants; and to challenge the supremacy of these giants. The platform has quietly been achieving one milestone after another, spreading to more than 200 pin codes, adding 2 lakh sellers, and attracting prominent names such as Paytm and Ola. But is this enough? What are the challenges? Anirban Chowdhury and ET's tech expert, Suraksha P, explore answers to these questions with ONDC's MD and CEO, Thampy Koshy You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: Twitter and Linkedin You can follow Suraksha P on her social media: Twitter and Linkedin Check out other interesting episodes from the host like: The Telegram Problem, Why The GST Official is India Inc's New Boogeyman, Bangladesh Battered, Taxing Times for Infosys, Will OLA Electrify the Markets?, and more!ET Podcasts now has a new show. 7@7 is your quick, sharp sub 5 minute daily roundup of financial news from India and the world. Tune in to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, Jio Saavn, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts from! Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief' on ET Play, The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Youtube.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

ONDC கடனாளியாக்குமா? | Gold Bond | Zomato Legends In Episode 5 of The Imperfect Show - Finance, join Imperfect Show fame Cibi and Financial Expert Va Nagappan as they dive into the latest financial topics: ONDC's Impact: Will the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) create financial burdens for businesses, or is it a revolutionary shift in commerce? Gold Bonds: A detailed analysis of Gold Bonds—are they a smart investment choice for you? Zomato Legends: Exploring Zomato's latest move—what does it mean for the food delivery market? Get expert insights and stay ahead in the financial game with this episode, exclusively on Spotify! #TheImperfectShow #Finance #ONDC #GoldBond #ZomatoLegends #Podcast #Cibi #VaNagappan

Nilay Patel, founder and Managing Director, EasyPay Puja Sharma of IBS Intelligence speaks with Nilay Patel, about the integration of lenders onto the ONDC network, the rising demand for loans among small retailers, and the future of co-lending. Patel offers his perspective on how these trends are transforming financial services for SMBs.

In this special episode, we hosted a very esteemed guest Dr.Pramod Varma, the Former Chief Architect Aadhaar, UPI, & India Stack, CTO EkStep Foundation, Co-Chair CDPI.dev, Co-Founder FIDE.org. He played an integral role in architecting India's digital health infrastructure, vaccination and immunization infrastructure (Co-WIN & DIVOC). He is the Co-Founder of FIDE, co-creator of the open source Beckn Protocol, the base protocol for India's new efforts such as Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC.org), Kochi Open Mobility Network, Namma Yatri, and ONEST.He is an advisor to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), National Health Authority (NHA), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Turing Institute Identity Initiative in the UK. Pramod holds a Master's and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master's in Applied Mathematics. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.In this podcast episode we spoke about the below topics, dive in:0:00 - Journey of Aadhaar's Chief Architect10:45 - The Impact of Aadhaar on India26:45 - India's role as Global Leader in Technology35:43 - The Role of AI in India40:30 - Tips for Indian EntrepreneursEnjoyed the podcast? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you are listening to this.Follow Prime Venture Partners:LinkedIn:   / primevp  Twitter:   / primevp_in  This podcast is for you. Do let us know what you like about the podcast, what you don't like, the guests you'd like to have on the podcast and the topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes.Please share your feedback here: https://primevp.in/podcastfeedback

Welcome to Top of the Morning by Mint, your weekday newscast that brings you five major stories from the world of business. It's Wednesday, May 15, 2024. My name is Nelson John. Let's get started:Indian stock markets trended upwards on Tuesday. Sensex and Nifty gained about half a percent each in yesterday's trading session. That was welcome news for Indian equity investors, who suffered through a string of loss-making sessions last week. That's all due to Vix — no, not the cough drop. Vix is an indication of the fear in the market sentiment. If the markets are up, Vix is down, as there is less fear of volatility in the market. Last week, the markets took a turn for the worse as the results of the general elections stoked fear among investors. Vix has been at a 19-month high of late, and investors want to book their profits in case of an unexpected result on June 4. Ram Sahgal writes a detailed explainer on why the elections are causing such instability across Indian equities.When the government launched the open network for digital commerce, or ONDC for short, it was supposed to be a game changer. A year and a half later, only one segment has actually seen some noted disruption: food delivery. Mobility, especially auto-rickshaw rides, are also doing well. But the rest of the apps haven't made ONDC their home just yet. As Sowmya Ramasubramanian writes, apparel, electronics, and other e-commerce ventures haven't fared well on ONDC. Even its success story, food delivery, did roughly 10 million orders, as opposed to 100 million between Zomato and Swiggy. ONDC was once heralded as the next possible success story after UPI. That comparison pales heavily today. Will ONDC be able to pick up some momentum soon?If you had friends in the West, you probably would've gotten some spectacular pictures of the sky from them. Social media was full of colourful skies last week, delighting many. But they were the result of a solar flare on the surface of the sun. This phenomenon can hurt power infrastructure, communications, and disrupt navigation. The pretty aurora borealis can thus disrupt our lives as we know it. Shouvik Das explains this occurrence, their severity, and how we can defend ourselves from a solar flare's negative effects.Godrej Properties is a landmark in India — both in terms of its name, and its real estate business. It has a market cap of 78,400 crore rupees, but its beginnings were quite humble. When it listed publicly in December 2009, it raised just 469 crore rupees — double of its revenue. But today, Godrej Properties rakes in more than 22,000 crore rupees as annual revenue. Its shares have increased by 239 percent in the last five years. There's one man from the Godrej family who can take credit for making its real estate arm as successful as it is today: Pirojsha Godrej. Godrej now competes with DLF, Prestige, and Macrotech in the real estate market. Madhurima Nandy tries to answer a burning question: what next for Godrej Properties?We were supposed to get Teslas on the Indian roads — instead, we got Tesla in the Indian courts. Recently, Tesla filed its first lawsuit in India against a battery seller named Tesla Power India. The Elon Musk-headed Tesla made this aggressive move to protect its brand and name. Krishna Yadav explains the rationale behind this move, which is the latest in the series of international brands protecting their likeness in India. Interestingly, as Krishna notes, the court's decision could also set a precedent for future trademark-infringement cases in India's growing electric vehicles market.We'd love to hear your feedback on this podcast. Let us know by writing to us at feedback@livemint.com. You may send us feedback, tips or anything that you feel we should be covering from your vantage point in the world of business and finance. Show notes:Mint Explainer: Why the national election is making the market swing wildly ONDC's e-commerce puzzle: Food thrives but apparel and electronics lag Solar storms: How deadly can they get? How Pirojsha Godrej changed India's real estate business Mint Explainer: How Tesla's first India lawsuit will affect EV trademark battles

In this episode of the Schbang In It Podcast, we sit down with Arjun Melwani, founder of OG Samosa, to discuss the world of cloud kitchens and the evolving landscape of food delivery. Arjun shares his experiences and insights into what led him to pursue a delivery-only kitchen model and how it differs from traditional dining establishments.   Join us as we explore how Arjun navigates the challenges of running a virtual kitchen, from ensuring food quality during delivery to optimising operations and managing costs. We'll also touch on the emerging trends he's noticed in the industry and how he's working to build brand awareness and loyalty without a physical storefront.   Whether you're interested in the rise of cloud kitchens or considering starting your own food delivery brand, this conversation offers valuable perspectives on the future of the food industry. Don't miss this engaging discussion with Arjun Melwani of OG Samosa!   Arjun Melwani's LinkedIn -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjun-melwani-1216931b2/    Indraneel Gawde's LinkedIn -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/neel-gawde-a027a196/   #SchbangInIt is now streaming live on Spotify, YouTube & all other major platforms. --------------- Produced By : Mriganka Kumari    Video Team: Ankit Sunil Philip Kannamkulam   Equipment: SK Vision   Design Team: Bhreehan About Us: Schbang, established in 2015, is a Creative, Technology and Media Transformation company with offices across Mumbai,  Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, and London, UK.   With a team of 1000+ members, it delivers growth-driven end-to-end solutions across creative development, strategic advisory, film production, web, design, content, data science, and media planning & buying verticals. It is also a valued Google Premier Partner, Adobe, Hubspot, MoEngage, Shopify, ONDC, and Zoho Premium Partner.   It has featured as a LinkedIn Top 25 start-up in 2018 and 2021 and on Financial Times' 450 High Growth Companies in the Asia Pacific List. In the last few years.   Schbang has created some exciting and award-winning digital work for brands like Jio, Fevicol, Ashok Leyland, Garnier, Cipla,  Asian Paints, Finolex Pipes, Crompton, Philips, Kaya Skin Clinic, London Dairy, Mattel, Xiaomi India, ASUS and many more brands.   Schbang is Founded by: Harshil Karia, Akshay Gurnani, Sohil Karia   Visit our Website: https://www.schbang.com/   Visit SchbangQ's Website: https://www.schbang-q.com/   Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schbang/?hl=en   Apply to work with us at: https://careers.schbang.com/jobs/Careers   Email us your briefs & ideas at bd@schbang.com #CreatingASchbang #SchbangInIt

It's been over a year since the govt launched Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The idea was to build the world largest e-commerce platform to check the monopoly of giants like Amazon and Flipkart. From ride-sharing and food delivery, to groceries, the platform can be used to buy and sell anything.The platform is close to hitting the 50 million transactions mark now. And what stands out about it is its fascinating pricing strategy that makes ordering food on it as much as 45% cheaper than a Swiggy or a Zomato. Could ONDC make the two food delivery giants redundant?While there is no easy  answer to the question, what made us more curious was this: Do we want ONDC to win? And if it does then what could be the consequences?Tune in to find out.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Can innovative technologies like India Stack truly pave the way for a digital-first economy? In a rapidly digitising world, how do initiatives like Aadhar and PMJDY redefine notions of financial inclusion? As India progresses in digital innovation, what unforeseen sectors might be revolutionised by the ripple effects of initiatives such as ONDC and UPI? Join us for the third episode of our series with Neelkanth Mishra, part-time Chair of India's UIDAI project and one of India's leading economists, as we delve deeper into India's shift towards a digital-first economy and showcase the innovative India Stack's pivotal role. Chapters: 00:00:00 - 00:01:10 Episode Introduction 00:01:10 - 00:22:26 What is ‘India Stack' and how are we feeling its impact? 00:22:26 - 00:24:08 How has India Stack influenced the digital infrastructure of other countries? 00:24:08 - 00:32:50 Neelkanth dissects the features and intricacies of Indian fintech initiatives 00:32:50 - 00:44:11 How are the Indian government and its stakeholders enhancing and expanding India Stack? 00:44:11 - 00:53:57 Neelkanth elaborates on how GST is empowering the growth and success of India Stack 00:53:57 - 00:58:35 How has GST helped in boosting India's economy? 00:58:35 - 01:12:18 The formation, functioning, and future outlook of ONDC 01:12:18 - 01:19:41 Neelkanth talks about current inefficiencies and prospective future of India Stack

Unified Healthcare Interface (UHI) is India's next digital public infrastructure (DPI), following earlier DPIs in payments (UPI), commerce (ONDC) and credit (OCEN).   In this episode, Shrikrishna Upadhyaya speaks to Rhea Singh (Project Lead, ABDM, NHA) and Akhil Siddharth (Project Associate, NHA) from the International Innovation Corps on the potential of UHI, challenges and opportunities. They discuss how UHI will transform the healthcare experience of patients, enable innovation by private players and create new digital governance architecture. Do check out Takshashila's public policy courses: https://school.takshashila.org.in/courses We are @‌IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. https://twitter.com/IVMPodcasts https://www.instagram.com/ivmpodcasts/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/ivmpodcasts/ You can check out our website at https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/featured Follow the show across platforms: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon Music .Do share the word with your folks  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy New Year— RSJHappy 2024, dear readers! We hope 2023 was good for all of you. If it wasn't, we are glad that it's behind you. We didn't have too bad a 2023 ourselves. This newsletter went along swimmingly (or so we think) and we had our book ‘Missing in Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy' published on 23 January 2023. Why haven't you bought it yet? Anyway, it seems to be doing well based on the modest expectations we had of it. I'm yet to see the pirated versions of it peddled at traffic signals. Heh, that will be the day. But then I see it on shelves of all decent bookstores and that's quite reassuring. That apart, Pranay had another book (one productive chap, I tell you), When The Chips Are Down on semiconductor geopolitics which is an area that's going to get more interesting and contentious in this decade. All in all, we ended up writing 44 editions during the year totaling up to over a hundred thousand words. A good year, I guess.On to 2024 then. Like in the past, we will indulge ourselves a bit in the first edition of the year. First, looking back at our predictions for 2023 and seeing how badly off we were and then next week, I will be doing a bit of crystal ball gazing for 2024.Before I bore you with that, let me share with you this wonderful excerpt from a paper I read recently. Titled ‘Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis', it covers an area of eternal fascination for me - Enlightenment and its impact on Western Europe. Interesting conclusions and a must-read:“The role of cultural attitudes—specifically, of Enlightenment ideals that had a progress oriented view of scientific and industrial pursuits—in Britain's economic takeoff and industrialization has been emphasized by leading economic historians. Foremost amongst them is Joel Mokyr (2016), who states that the progress-oriented view of science promoted by great Enlightenment thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, among many others, was central to what would become the “Industrial Enlightenment,” and ultimately Britain's Industrial Revolution. In this paper, we test these claims using quantitative data from 173,031 works printed in England in English between 1500 and 1900. A textual analysis resulted in three salient findings. First, there is little overlap in scientific and religious works in the period under study. This indicates that the “secularization” of science was entrenched from the beginning of the Enlightenment. Second, while scientific works did become more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment, this sentiment was mainly concentrated in the nexus of science and political economy. We interpret this to mean that it was the more pragmatic works of science—those that spoke to a broader political and economic audience, especially those literate artisans and craftsmen at the heart of Britain's industrialization—that contained the cultural values cited as important for Britain's economic rise. Third, while volumes at the science-political economy nexus were progress-oriented for the entire time period, this was especially true of volumes related to industrialization. Thus, we have unearthed some inaugural quantitative support for the idea that a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British Industrial Revolution and its economic takeoff.”2023 Predictions ScorecardI had 8 predictions across the global economy, Indian economy and Indian social and political order. So, this is how does the 2023 report card looks like.Global EconomyThis is what I had written:#1 The trend of securing your supply chain for critical products will get stronger.….but it is clear to most large economies that on issues that concern national security, it will be foolhardy to not plan for worst-case scenarios any longer. And national security could mean anything, really, but I can see on energy and key technology, nations will opt for more secure supply chains with watertight bilateral partnerships than be at the mercy of distributed, multilateral chains. I won't go as far as calling it ‘de-globalisation' yet, but this ‘gated globalisation' is a trend that's here to stay.This is playing out but a bit slower than what I expected. Disentangling and building domestic capabilities isn't easy. And it is costly. But through the year we had increasing curbs on what hi-tech (GPU chips, AI research) and defence companies domiciled in the West could export to China. At home, we continued the push on PLI on electronics and tech equipment with debates on how much value-added manufacturing is really coming through in these schemes. Also, interestingly, we are continuing down the path of decoupling from global ‘default platforms' especially in financial services. The Rupay platform is continuing to get bigger with a specific push from the government to derisk payment infrastructure from global networks like Visa and Mastercard. Also, in a recent statement, the central bank has suggested building a homegrown Cloud Computing infrastructure that will be used on regulated entities in India so that they aren't tied into global Cloud service providers. #2 The fears of elevated inflation and a recession in the US in 2023 are overblown. The recession is due, but it will come a bit laterMy view is that as supply chain issues ease up with China opening up, energy demand going up and the US continuing to be at almost full employment, we might have a 2023 where for the most part, the US inflation will be higher than target, Fed will continue to remain hawkish, and the growth will hold up. This will mean the real risk of recession will be more toward the end of the year than now.Turns out I was accurate. In fact, the US economy has held up even better than I expected. And the Fed almost softened their tone by their last meeting of the year.#3 Big Tech will continue to be under the coshI half expect India to gradually move all payment and eCommerce arms of Big Tech into a structure that's domestically controlled and owned in 2023. Third, FTC, with Hina Khan at the helm, will accelerate antitrust and competition law changes to reduce the dominance of Big Tech.I think I got this right in a big way. Through the year, fintechs have offloaded ‘troublesome' shareholders (read Chinese investors) and there is a real trend of what's called ‘reverse flipping' where unicorns that were domiciled outside of India for tax and regulatory reasons are coming back home. Reason? Well, if you ask them they will tell you because they believe in the India story. That's very convenient. The real reason is domestic regulators are making it difficult for a non-domiciled company to get a full bite of the Indian apple. From data security and storage requirements to tax and fund transfer regulations, the entities that are essentially Indian but are registered outside India to avoid ‘regulatory inconvenience' are now facing business inconvenience in following that model. Here's more on this. Indian EconomyI think I wrote more about the Indian economy in 2023 than any previous year. Much of it was about my surprise, in a positive way, on how much better it was doing than my expectations. Now as I read what I had written at the start of 2023, I think I had somewhat forgotten during the year that I was quite optimistic about the economy at the start of the year. Here's what I had written:#1 Greater optimismI am a bit more optimistic about the broader numbers than most, and I will explain why. I think GDP growth will come in around 6.5 per cent for FY24, and inflation will be around 5 per cent. We might see a couple of rate hikes in the next few months, taking the repo rate to 6.75 per cent, but that will be it. I see domestic consumption to remain strong and exports, in the light of the shift away from China, to be good for manufacturers, and how much ever I might struggle to get behind the PLI scheme, it will yield some short-term benefits. IT exports might be a dampener, but on balance, I see more upside to these predictions.Couldn't have gotten it more right. I think the growth for FY 24 might come in at 7 per cent. Repo ended up at 6.5 per cent and domestic consumption and manufacturing have stayed strong while IT exports have gone worse over the year. #2 Digitalisation: Wave 2There will be a significant push on digitalisation in lending and eCommerce. The UPI infrastructure has revolutionised payments and, along with GST, has accelerated the formalisation of the economy..... Also, as I mentioned in an earlier point, doing this will also mean shifting the balance of power from Big Tech-owned entities to an open platform or domestically controlled entities. I sense a strong push in this direction in 2023.This was a no-brainer, really. I expected a bit more traction on platforms like OCEN and ONDC which haven't taken off yet. The digitisation of the financial services sector has made low-value credit much easier for people to access. And UPI and digital KYC have enabled that to an extent that unsecured individual lending saw its biggest year ever in 2023. In fact, by the end of the year, we saw the central bank intervening to increase risk weights on these advances for banks and NBFCs and trying to bring down growth rates. The risk of an asset bubble because of faster and easier access to credit seems to become real based on the data they were reading. #3 The expected capex cycle push from the government will not come.There are a couple of reasons for it. First, this government has always been careful about fiscal deficit, and it is particular about the risk of the fiscal space. The government has committed to a 4.5 per cent target for the union government deficit in the next 3 years from the current levels, that's expected to be 6.4 per cent. I see a tightening in the fiscal stance during the year with a gradual reduction in some of the pandemic-related subsidies and better targeting of the benefits improving distribution efficiency. The other reason for a muted capex spend is the likely belief that the private sector credit capex cycle seems to be picking up. Got it mostly right except for the private sector capex cycle bit. That didn't show up in 2023 as I was expecting. Government capex actually slowed as it kept its glide path to a 4 per cent union deficit by 2026. The efficiency improvement in tax collections and subsidy disbursement also helped in broadly sticking to the fiscal plan for the year. And as I expected, this government doesn't need to loosen its purse strings in an election year. It has multiple other tools in its armoury to swing people's opinion in favour of it.  India: Political and SocialI had generally anticipated a more-of-the-same year despite some of the noise surrounding opposition efforts at the start of 2023. BJP with PM Modi at the helm, is possibly the most formidable political force in the world and it can turn its missteps too into its advantage. We saw this during the pandemic when its response was poor and too late. But that's all water under the bridge now. It is also helped by a coincidence of circumstances where China has gone off-track and India is able to play its ‘swing power' role to its fullest advantage in global geopolitics. All of this has meant it has a compelling domestic narrative to offer to the people of India rising in global prominence. This has tremendous capital at least among the middle class and the Hindi heartland. Back to what I wrote at the start of the year:#1 More of the sameThe expected consolidation of opposition forces to counter the BJP isn't going to happen early enough for it to mount a credible challenge in 2024. There are eight state elections in 2023, and I suspect BJP will see reverses or very close fights in a couple of them where it is the incumbent (MP and Karnataka)....But it is hard to see opposition consolidation or a credible case that they can make to counter the electoral juggernaut of the BJP at this time. Congress, the other national party, isn't capable of moving the masses either with its agenda or its leadership. The vacuum in national politics looks set to stay.Ho hum. BJP lost Karnataka like I thought they would. MP was a surprise and it only shows how poorly Congress has performed through the year. Everything else is, as they say, same same.#2 More Exit, Less VoiceI have made the point in the past about social fault lines tripping us up while we magically have a growth window that's opened up for us again. This holds true. The space for opposition or dissent has shrunk; more importantly, even the fight for protecting or broadening that space has gone out....The state would be dependent on citizens if they value their loyalty and would then pursue a policy that listens to their voice. However, if the state doesn't value it and the citizens know their voice won't matter, the only option is to exit. For certain sections of our citizenry, they are possibly at this stage of engagement with the state. This scenario might not hurt the majority today, but we would do well to remember it has never been a good idea for the state to not value the loyalty of its citizenry in the long run. Nothing has changed on this. I guess this macro trend has only exacerbated in 2023.So there I am with my report card. Not too bad, I guess though Pranay may again complain that these were quite generic and unless we make very specific predictions, it all seems to come true at the end of the year. Well, I will try to do that next week with my 2024 predictions. But don't hold your breath on that, Pranay.  A Framework A Week: Four Components of an Economic StrategyTools for thinking about public policy— Pranay KotasthaneMontek Singh Ahluwalia writes that any economic strategy has four components: slogans, targets, programmes, and policies. Slogans refer to rhetoric employed by the government. Ahluwalia calls it the “front end” of economic strategy. Rhetoric is necessary in a representative democracy for communicating the government's position on an issue in a simple, catchy form without going into the details of the accompanying policy measures. Think Garibi Hataao, Shining India, Inclusive Growth, Sabka Saath Sabkaa Vikaas, and Minimum Government and Maximum Governance. Targets are specific, measurable goals of an economic strategy. An example is the articulation that India will become a developed country by 2047. The World Bank comes up with a GDP per capita threshold for classifying an economy as a high-income one. So the target becomes a guiding light for policies and programmes and also serves as a tool for holding the government accountable.Programmes refer to government-led measures involving public expenditure. Policies are government directives that allow or disallow specific economic activities. The difference can be understood using another popular three-fold classification which says that all governments do only three things — produce, finance, and regulate. This means programmes are government actions that involve producing or financing, while policies are about regulating. For example, bank recapitalisation is a programme where the government is financing public sector banks. In contrast, the Foreign Trade Policy 2023 lays down the rules that govern all exports and imports. This four-fold classification is useful for policy analysts for two reasons. One, it doesn't look at slogans cynically. Economic narratives are important. Slogans are often launchpads for powerful narratives.Secondly, differentiating policies from programmes is crucial. The default government tendency is often to bat for government-run programmes. Think Production-linked Incentives (PLI) and export subsidies. There are enough and more programmes from the past to tinker with and regurgitate them into a new programme to “solve” the economic problems of the day. However, chronic economic problems might need a fundamental change in policies that cannot be fixed by programmes alone. India's manufacturing underperformance is one such example. Though there have been many a programme for overcoming this challenge, the solution lies in changing trade, tax, labour, and doing business policies. Another example comes from the 1991 economic reforms. At the time, many politicians thought that India only needed a debt restructuring programme. However, the reformers successfully argued that India needed a change in tax, business, and investment policies; a new programme alone wasn't good enough. For an illustration of this framework, check this article by Montek Singh Ahluwalia on the problem with India's public sector banks.PolicyWTF: Screws are Strategic This section looks at egregious public policies. Policies that make you go: WTF, Did that really happen?— Pranay KotasthaneThe Department to Ground Foreign Trade, or less accurately, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), is a gift that keeps giving. Their latest policy move is to restrict the import of cheap screws so that India can become a self-reliant vishwaguru of screws. A screwpower, maybe? In a notification issued on 3rd Jan, the DGFT banned the imports of screws priced lower than ₹129/kg. Indian manufacturers used to import these from France, China, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Belgium.So, the government wants to do an import substitution of a humble product that costs ₹129 per kg and already has a diversified supply chain. If this isn't ridiculous enough, think about the impact on Indian manufacturers who relied on these imports. They are the ones getting screwed here because they will end up paying more for the same product. Long-time readers might experience déjà vu as there was a similar policy restricting the imports of mosquito electronic racquets in 2020, to which RSJ had paid proper obeisance in edition #129. In other news, one of the issues blocking the India-UK FTA is that Indian EV car manufacturers don't want the high import duties to be dropped. Currently, electric cars priced above $40000 are slapped with a 100 per cent import duty, while those below $40000 are levied a 70 per cent duty. Domestic manufacturers argue that a reduction in import duty will stall the sunrise industry. These two stories in recent months illustrate the slippery slope of industrial policy in low state capacity conditions. A domestic subsidy for manufacturers can still be justified because every other country is doing that. It's become an entry pass of sorts to play the manufacturing game. But to couple domestic production subsidies with import restrictions makes these policies scarily close to the import substitution regime in the pre-1991 era. Every government makes mistakes. However, low state capacity results in governments repeating the mistakes of the past as there is no institutional memory. We seem to be reaching that point with India's industrial policies. This observation also stands empirically. Check out the New Industrial Policy Observatory (NIPO) released by the IMF (hat-tip to Niranjan Rajadhyaksha for sharing the accompanying paper on X). The database classifies industrial policy actions over the last few years into eight categories: export barriers, import barriers, domestic subsidies, export incentives, FDI measures, Public procurement measures, Localisation content measures, and miscellaneous. This is by far the most detailed database of industrial policy measures I've seen—a fantastic tool for scholars working in economic policy.Now here's my initial analysis looking at the data for India in NIPO. Of the 195 industrial policy measures that India has taken, 55 are distortionary trade measures, illustrating that we are repeating import substitution ideas of the past. There's more to this. In the database, one can also classify industrial policies sectorwise. Here again, we see that import tariffs feature across most sectors. Such mindless import substitution will lead to export contraction, as Indian companies become uncompetitive and bow out of international competition. We have seen this movie before.P.S.: Look at this chart of trade as a per cent of GDP for the world's five largest economies. Trade is a higher proportion of India's GDP than is the case for Japan and China. It's been that way for the last ten years. Trade is far more important to India than we realise. HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters* [Book] Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom is a thoroughly enjoyable, myth-busting biography. * [Blogpost] This post has a mind map of market failures and corresponding government interventions. A boon for anyone interested in public policy.* [Podcast] Listen in to a Puliyabaazi with economist Rohit Lamba on India's future economic trajectories. This is a fun episode. * [Paper] A useful take on Foreign Trade Policy 2023 in Economic and Political Weekly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

In this episode of The Startup Operator Roundup, Gunjan and Roshan break down the week's startup news and more! If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode! 00:00 Intro02:20 Google's Gemini to take on GPT-408:14 Byju's liquidity crisis12:57 ONDC's new initiative 15:25 RBI's regulatory framework  18:27 Zestmoney shuts down 20:37 Zerodha's insane growth 25:00 Fund Raises of the week  ------------------------------------- Subscribe to our WhatsApp community for regular updates:https://www.whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaA80HPIN9ixCWykZO1C ------------------------------------- Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator/​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup ------------------------------------- If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode!

This week's episode is about India's spending habits, ONDC & building 10club… as we welcome Bhavna Suresh, founder of 10club, to the Neon Show!How Is ONDC Impacting the E-Commerce Market?Is There A Bias Towards Women CEOs In India?How Much Has Entrepreneurship CHANGED In India?All these TRENDING topics and more in this CAPTIVATING conversation. A deep dive into what makes ONDC such a force to be reckoned with in the e-commerce industry & how Bhavna Suresh is leading the charge for home decor in India… Tune in NOW!Shot By: Aravindh YuvarajCheck his profile out here:   / createdby.aravindhyuvaraj  Sponsor Shout OutLooking to build a differentiated tech startup with a 10X better solution? Prime is the high conviction, high support investor you need. With its fourth fund of $120M, Prime actively works with star teams to accelerate building great companies.To know more, visit https://primevp.in/!

Pop Quiz - Have you heard of Kudumbashree? Or Cauvery Handicrafts? What about Biswa Bangla? If you are at a loss, you are missing the ONDC bus. Kudumbashree (Kerala Emporium) deals in Pickles, Honey and other Gourmet foods. Cauvery Handicrafts deals in wooden crafts like Channapatna toys, Rosewood paintings and jewellery. Biswa Bangla is famous for its collection of Darjeeling Teas and Sundarban Honey. All of them are reaching new markets, new consumers at cheaper cost and loving it. And this is not even the beginning. ONDC is driving India's e-commerce revolution coupled with lasting social impact. 13+ Social Enterprises like Very Much Indian, House of Chikankari, Shwet, Katori, Tamul, and Iraaloom alone impact 200,000 artisans via ONDC. Our guest Shireesh Joshi, the COO of ONDC, tells us why the world is looking to India to see another UPI moment unfold in the retail space. Do write in to tell us what you think at 3TB@unblox.com. Follow us on Amazon, Insta or YouTube   

It's easy to start in India but very difficult to scale in India. This 3.5-hour podcast will cover everything you need to know about scaling a fashion, beauty, or home brand from zero to the first 20 crores, and then to 100 crores and beyond. We have the most requested podcast guest - Kishore Biyani BACK to drop some knowledge bombs. We also have Raj, who took the route of "digital-first" for his business expansion, and Ananth, who decoded e-commerce and marketplaces first. They delve deep into every important aspect one should know for scaling a brand, such as brand names, logos, category selection, performance marketing, SEO, growth hacking, marketplace strategies, distribution decisions, and community building. It will be a crash course for anyone who wants to take his/her brand from 0 to 1. If you're below 22 and are working on building a brand from 0 to 1 in fashion, beauty, or home, here's the chance for that support you've been looking for from India's best business minds. ➡️Apply here: https://tally.so/r/mBp7LN #NikhilKamath: Co-founder of Zerodha, True Beacon and Gruhas Follow Nikhil here: Twitter https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamat... Facebook https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamath... Linkedin https://in.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkama... Koo https://www.kooapp.com/profile/Nikhil...#KishoreBiyani Founder of Future Group (https://www.futuregroup.in/) #AnanthNarayanan: Founder of Mensa Brands Follow Ananth here: Twitter https://twitter.com/anarayanan24 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/narayanan.a... Linkedin https://in.linkedin.com/in/ananth-nar... #RajShamani: Content Creator & Founder of House of X, Figuring Out Podcast Follow Raj here: Twitter https://twitter.com/rajshamani Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rajshamani/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/shamaniraj/ Linkedin https://in.linkedin.com/in/rajshamani Raj's Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@rajshamani Timestamps (00:00) - Intro (02:06) - Ananth's Career Path (04:23) - Ananth's Myntra CEO Journey (07:19) - Ananth's Entry into Pharmacy (09:18) - Ananth's E-commerce Return (13:16) - Mensa Brands: Explained (19:45) - Unveiling Raj's Business Side (21:23) - Raj on House of X Fundraising (22:44) - China's Live-Streaming Trend (23:38) - Raj's Family Business Growth (27:47) - Raj's Customer Insights (31:30) - Data for Product Development (33:53) - Raj's Marketing Tricks (38:35) - Raj's Family Business Exit (42:11) - Raj's 400M Views Formula (43:30) - Social Media Virality Tips (46:42) - Kishore's Consumption Insights (52:33) - India's Consumption Demographics (01:03:16) - Luxury Brands' Tricks (01:08:51) - BNPL Convenience (01:10:28) - Quiet Luxury & Signaling (01:16:37) - Content & Community (01:24:42) - Scaling to 20 Crores (01:30:19) - Westernized Branding (01:35:14) - Growth & E-commerce Hacks (01:50:36) - Performance Marketing Role (01:52:42) - Category Selection Navigation (01:55:07) - Art of Brand Storytelling (01:59:49) - High Price vs. Quality (02:02:20) - Brand Longevity Insights (02:04:28) - Unlocking Beauty Industry (02:10:09) - Micro-Niche Strategy & Picks (02:16:44) - SKU Count Decisions (02:20:21) - AI & Machine Learning Impact (02:25:47) - Customer Reviews & Returns (02:29:22) - Creator & Celebrity Brands (02:35:59) - Addition vs. Replacement Categories (02:38:10) - Brands Preferred by Raj (02:40:05) - Panelists' Views on Virtue Signaling (02:44:44) - Indian Luxury Brand Opportunity (02:48:05) - Celebrity/Influencer Selection (02:59:30) - Kishore's Daughter's Ventures (03:01:08) - Offline in 100+ Crores Sales (03:02:58) - Platforms: Valuation & Models (03:04:13) - ONDC's Platform Disruption (03:06:44) - Panelists' Thriving Sectors (03:08:53) - Nikhil's Lululemon Love (03:12:27) - Untapped Men's Makeup Market (03:14:51) - Micro-Influencers & Failures (03:20:15) - Special Announcement: Apply Now! (03:23:10) - Bloopers Time! (03:23:59) - Outro

In this Roundup, we explore the G20 Summit's surprising effects on startups, the cross-border evolution of ONDC, Reliance, Tata, and Nvidia's digital revolution in India, GreyOrange's audacious switch to SaaS, and First Cheque's incredible achievements in the jewellery industry.Learn why NavIC support is crucial and how Nvidia's partnerships are helping India reach new heights in AI. Watch our episode with Pramod Ghadge(Co-founder & CEO of Unbox Robotics) on building a robotics and automation: https://youtu.be/KVq0JrS5Yvc?si=KT-wE66R1xzBdUSU Topics: 00:00 Intro01:24 Apple's iPhone 1502:45 G-20's impact on the startup ecosystem, The Saudi- India startup bridge07:48 ONDC going global09:52 NavIC - a major step towards technological self-reliance13:38 Reliance, Tata and Nvidia collaboration17:25 GreyOrange to raise $80-million19:50 GIVA and Firstcheque's 75X success20:10 Fundraises of the week21:41 Talk of the town - “VCs don't value companies” 24:15 New and exciting interviews coming up on The Startup Operator25:00 Catch us live on 28th september Don't miss the latest insights and opportunities in India's dynamic startup ecosystem.  Subscribe now and join the conversation! Like, share, and comment on this episode for more impactful updates. Don't forget to press the bell icon.

On this episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to T Koshy, MD and CEO of ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce). ONDC is a private non-profit Section 8 company established by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) of Government of India to develop open e-commerce. Previously, Mr Koshy was part of the startup team of NSDL (National Securities Depository Limited). He subsequently joined Ernst & Young as a senior partner, where he worked exclusively in population scale problems and its digital solutions. He has played a key role in projects such as DEMAT, UIDAI, GST, the Tax Information Network, and CoWIN to name a few, and has been involved extensively with the ecosystem developing open source solutions and digital public infrastructure.In this conversation you will learn about e-commerce, the setting up of ONDC, how the protocol works, how it facilitates sellers and buyers, use cases, the future of ONDC and more.TCR: Weekend Edition with T Koshy on YoutubeFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube | Telegram

Welcome to #124th episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. The Roundup is our weekly views on the news from the Indian Startup Ecosystem. Dive into this episode with Gunjan and Roshan! In this captivating discussion: Discover the jaw-dropping launch of Aditya-L1 and its audacious mission. Uncover the future of e-commerce with ONDC and its potential for conflicts. Explore Amazon's $20 billion partnership with Indian Railways and Post The incredible success of UP's ODOP scheme and the intriguing transformation of All India Gaming Regulation. Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator/Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup WhatsApp Link : https://wa.me/917019472685?text=Hi,%20I'd%20like%20to%20receive%20updates If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode!

On today's episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to T Koshy, CEO of Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) as well as ICICI Securities strategist Vinod Karki.SHOW NOTES[00:50] Pace of Road construction in India, could go up 25% by next year, says Crisil Ratings. [02:22] How Taxi & Auto Unions Are Driving Adoption of  ONDC by the thousands. [10:52] India's traditional industries like iron and steel lead the pack in gross value add or GVA contribution to the economy.[18:01] 32 Companies Apply to Make Laptops in India.For more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | Youtube | Telegram

In this episode we discuss:[00:02:12] How did Nitin's definition of "impact" change over time?[00:03:44] When did Nitin join the VC industry, and what was the market condition at that time?[00:07:54] What was the most important lesson Nitin learned from his time at NEA (New Enterprise Associates)?[00:10:50] How is the VC industry different in the US compared to India?[00:16:06] What are some things that founders in India don't understand about VCs?[00:20:29] Why did Nitin become interested in EdTech?[00:23:00] What is Nitin's view on the future of EdTech in India and the role of AI in the sector?[00:27:00] What is Antler and what is its mission in the startup ecosystem?[00:28:23] What specific pain points is Antler India addressing for founders in the ideation phase?[00:29:01] How does Antler differentiate itself from traditional venture capitalists?[00:30:30] How does Antler's global network benefit startups in India and help them think about their products and teams differently?[00:31:14] What does Antler focus on in the early stage investing process, particularly at the pre-seed stage?[00:31:54] Does Antler only look for future founders in colleges or does it consider applicants from various backgrounds?[00:32:35] What is the Antler India Fellowship, and how does it help democratize entrepreneurship?[00:35:00] How does Antler reduce the cost of experimenting and building startups, and what are the key factors that Antler considers when evaluating founders?[00:38:00] What are the challenges and limitations of venture capital in India?[00:41:25] What factors make India a promising market for startups, and what are some counter examples that indicate the potential for significant success?[00:44:00] What is the role of a VC, and what are the key learnings and qualities required to be successful in venture capital?[00:47:29] How do ONDC and Web3 differ in their approach to decentralization, and what are the challenges and opportunities for both?[00:52:15] What are some of the potential benefits of ONDC for small businesses in India, and how could it bridge the gap between digital payments and digital commerce?[00:54:16] Where does Nitin see Antler India in 10 years and what is the desired impact on the startup ecosystem?AboutNitin is a seasoned early-stage investor, having invested in 60+ tech startups in multiple geographies. With First Principles, he built a thesis-driven proprietary portfolio of 40+ angel investments backed by marquee investors. As the founder of Incrypt Blockchain, he has been the first Indian VC to play an active role in fostering India's blockchain ecosystem. Nitin and his team have invested in 16 blockchain projects since 2017, with the Incrypt Blockchain portfolio spanning projects such as Arweave, Mudrex, OnJuno, BAT, Ocean, Molecule, Persistence and more.Previously, Nitin was a founding team principal at Lightbox Ventures, one of India's leading consumer-focused VCs, where he helped build the first two funds since the very inception.Earlier in his career, he learnt the ropes of the VC business in the US, while being at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world's preeminent venture funds. At NEA, he worked on multiple investments with successful IPO/M&A outcomes (Millennial Media, AddThis, OPower, etc.) and co-led the firm's first education technology investment. He also served as an early executive at EverFi (one of the world's largest education networks, $250M raised), and started his career as a technology investment banker at UBS Investment Bank in San Francisco.Nitin holds an MBA from The Wharton School, and two degrees from the University of Southern California. He serves on the India Advisory Boards of AngelList, the USC Viterbi School and The Better India, and advises the Indian government (NITI Aayog) on frontier tech policy.

In this informative episode, The Boys share their thoughts about ONDC which stands for: Open Network for Digital Commerce. They also discuss the potential future of ONDC, Swiggy, & Zomato. Grab your favourite drink and enjoy the episode! Podcast Socials: https://www.instagram.com/wickedgames... https://www.instagram.com/ ruxsheel https://www.instagram.com/ siddharthsign https://www.instagram.com/ vishnu_614 https://www.instagram.com/ theycallusu... https://linktr.ee/wickedgames

Open Network For Digital Commerce (ONDC), set up as a non-profit company (like the National Payments Corporation of India), is a network that lets sellers voluntarily display their products and services across all participating apps and platforms. ONDC, a UPI of e-commerce, seeks to democratise digital or electronic commerce, moving it from a platform-centric model to an open network. It aims to sign up 900 million buyers and 1.2 million sellers on the shared network within the next five years while achieving a gross merchandise value of $48 billion. Yet, there is confusion as to how the space operates and how will it help to unlock growth for all the players involved in the ecosystem. ONDC has also entered the B2Bspace, which many believe will unlock another level of growth. In this episode, Anshoo Sharma, CEO of Magicpin and Rishav Jain, Managing Director, consumer and retail lead at Alvarez & Marsal to talk about ONDC and the future of it. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/business-line/message

When the govt launched Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), the idea was to build the world largest e-commerce platform to check the monopoly of giants like Amazon and Flipkart. You could think of ONDC as the UPI of e-commerce. From ride-sharing and food delivery, to groceries, the platform can be used to buy and sell anything. Lately, ONDC has been doing some interesting things with pricing. For example, someone ordered food on it for a price that was 45% lower than Swiggy. This, obviously, got thinking. Could ONDC kill the likes of Swiggy and Zomato and others?While there is no exact answer to that because of a bunch of factors, what made us more curious was this: Do we want ONDC to win? And if it does then what could be the consequences?Tune in to find out.Recommended reading: Why everyone wants a piece of India's open e-commerce platform  Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) is being touted as the government's next big digital initiative after UPI (Unified Payments Interface). The ambitious open-source network aims to connect all buyers and sellers in the e-com space and to more than treble the country's e-commerce penetration to 25% of its 1.4 billion population. ONDC has recently been part of the internet chatter for the discounts on online food delivery that is massively undercutting Swiggy and Zomato. Are the discounts sustainable? Who's funding them? Will more people take to this vast cluttered network? Is ONDC here to stay?  Anirban Chowdhury and Mugdha Variyar speak to:  T Koshy, CEO, ONDC to understand the potential and the next big plans of the platforms.  Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder & CEO of magicpin  Credits: NDTV, Aaj Tak, India Today, Money Control If you like this episode from Anirban Chowdhury, check out his other interesting episodes on El Niño: Little Boy, Big Trouble, Will music streaming platforms survive in India?, Lufthansa CEO on its turnaround, India and Air India, and much more! If you like this episode from Mugdha Variyar, check out her other interesting episodes on Angel Tax, The Demon that haunts startups, Saving Face On Social Media: The New Era of Brand Protection, The Gig Economy Gets Grimmer and more! You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: Twitter and Linkedin You can follow our host Mugdha Variyar on her social media: Twitter and Linkedin  Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief' on ET Play, The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Google Podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

फूड डिलीवरी और ई-कॉमर्स ऐसे दो क्षेत्र हैं जहां सरकार ने दिग्गजों के पर काटे बिना, डुओ पॉली (दो कंपनियों के प्रभुत्व) प्रणाली को रोकने के लिए एक अप्रत्यक्ष तंत्र बनाया है.

Welcome to the latest episode of our ONDC series! This week, we're diving into the world of Seller Apps and their potential to drive economic growth in India. To gain a deeper understanding, we spoke with Medarisha Lyngdoh, Co-founder and COO - eSamudaay and Ravinder Singh Mahori, Co-founder and CTO - eSamudaay. In a free-wheeling discussion on the work eSamudaay is doing to empower small sellers in India, we spoke about:

In today's episode for 12th May 2023, we talk about the disruption by the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) in food delivery. We've launched an endeavor to give simplified health and life insurance advice via Ditto Insurance. Book a free consultation call with our advisors or just drop us a text on WhatsApp for all your insurance queries. Check out Ditto: https://bit.ly/3ym6GjO Insta- https://www.instagram.com/joinditto/ Twitter- https://twitter.com/joinditto

Last year in October, the Karnataka government banned Ola and Uber autorickshaws after they were caught overcharging. A month later a new app was launched and it was almost antithesis of Ola and Uber. It charged zero commission from drivers and no cancellation or surge charges from riders. Plus, the government supported it by saying it would be listed on its e-commerce behemoth, ONDC.Yet, eight months later, Namma Yatri is not growing as much as expected in terms of registered drivers and users. Tune in to find out more.Recommended reading: Your Namma Yatri auto driver may still be on Uber, OlaAlso, listen to: Gaurav Munjal of Unacademy on being confrontational, paranoid and transparentDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.  

पिछले कुछ दिनों से सोशल मीडिया पर ONDC की खूब चर्चा हो रही है. ये एक ओपन नेटवर्क प्लेटफॉर्म है, जिसे लोकल बिजनेसेस के लिए तैयार किया जा रहा है. वैसे तो ये प्लेटफॉर्म अभी बीटा फेज में है, लेकिन कई लोग इसे यूज कर पा रहे हैं. यूजर्स का दावा है कि इस प्लेटफॉर्म पर दूसरों के मुकाबले 60 परसेंट तक सस्ते में फूड आइटम मिल रहा है. रिपोर्ट्स की मानें तो इस प्लेटफॉर्म पर डेली 10 हजार ऑर्डर आ रहे हैं. इस प्लेटफॉर्म की मदद से आप डिस्काउंट पर प्रोडक्ट्स हासिल कर सकते हैं और सस्ते में फूड ऑर्डर कर सकते हैं, लेकिन सवाल आता है कि ये सब हो कैसे रहा है और In Our Devices में Asus ने भारत में अपना नया लैपटॉप लॉन्च कर दिया है. इसका नाम VivoBook 15 OLED रखा गया है. Poco ने दो नए स्मार्टफोन्स लॉन्च कर दिए हैं. कंपनी ने Poco F5 5G और Poco F5 Pro 5G को लॉन्च किया है. ब्रांड के फ्लैगशिप स्मार्टफोन में आपको टॉप-एंड क्वालकॉम प्रोसेसर मिलता है. स्मार्टफोन में Dollby Vision सपोर्ट वाली AMOLED स्क्रीन मिलेगी, सुनिए 'सबका मालिक टेक' के इस एपिसोड में मानस, अमन और आश्री के साथ.

In April, a 66-year-old Indian citizen by the name of Sundar Nagarajan was arrested in London, for his connections with the banned Lebanese terror outfit Hezbollah. What's the story here? Listen in to know more! In other news, there's a new cool kid on the food delivery block – ONDC or Open Network for Digital Commerce. This platform hopes to revolutionise online food delivery in India by eliminating the middleman between businesses and consumers.Tune in to The Signal Daily to know more!  You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android, iOS or any other podcast app. You can check out our website at https://ivmpodcasts.com/. Do follow IVM Podcasts on social media. We are @IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. Follow the show across platforms: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts,  Amazon Prime Music. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cyberpolitik: AI and Crime Prevention: Is it a force multiplier?— Satya SahuCrime prevention is based on the idea that crime can be reduced or eliminated by modifying the factors that influence its occurrence or consequences. We can classify “prevention” into three main types: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary prevention addresses the root causes of crime or deters potential offenders before they commit a crime. Secondary prevention aims to intervene with at-risk groups or individuals to prevent them from becoming involved in crime. Finally, tertiary prevention efforts seek to rehabilitate or punish offenders to prevent them from reoffending. (This, however, is beyond the scope of today's discussion.)Flipping the coin, we notice that policing is based on the idea that law enforcement and public order can be maintained by enforcing the law and responding to crimes or incidents. Policing also lends itself to being classified into two main types: reactive and proactive. Reactive policing responds to reported crimes or incidents after they occur. Proactive policing anticipates or prevents crimes or incidents before they occur. On the face of it, AI can help us prevent and fight crime by enhancing both types of crime prevention and policing.AI can digest and analyse petabytes of data from disparate sources, such as social media, CCTV footage, sensors used in our Smart Cities™, and boring old digitised government records, to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that can indicate potential criminal activity. For example, the police in Vancouver use predictive models to identify areas where robberies are expected to occur and then post officers to deter potential thieves or other criminals. Similarly, the police in Los Angeles use a system called PredPol that generates maps of hotspots where crimes are likely to happen based on past data. These systems can help the police allocate their resources more efficiently and effectively and reduce crime rates and response times.When it comes to collecting and processing evidence, such as fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition, voice recognition, and digital forensics etc., we can look at the UK Home Office's VALCRI, which uses AI to analyse large volumes of data from different sources, such as crime reports, witness statements, CCTV footage, and social media posts, to generate hypotheses and leads for investigators. For example, the police in India used ML-backed facial recognition technology to reunite thousands of missing children with their families. Moreover, AI can help the police in presenting evidence and arguments in court, such as using natural language processing to generate concise summaries or transcripts of testimonies or documents.It could augment efforts to monitor and evaluate police performance and conduct, such as using dashcams, bodycams, or drones to record their interactions with the public and/or suspects. For example, the police in New Orleans developed a program called EPIC that uses AI to analyse video footage from bodycams to identify instances of misconduct or excessive force by officers. It can also help the police in engaging with the public and building trust and confidence, such as using chatbots or social media platforms to communicate with citizens and provide critical information services, hopefully unlike the chatbot from my bank's beleaguered website.However, all this has enormous implications for the jurisprudential underpinnings of crime prevention and policing. One such significance arises when AI itself can change the nature and scope of crime and criminality. AI can enable new forms of crime that exploit its capabilities and vulnerabilities, such as cyberattacks, biometric spoofing, deepfakes, autonomous weapons, or social engineering. Unlike their current-crime counterparts, leveraging AI allows these future crimes to be more sophisticated, scalable and anonymous than conventional ones. Therefore, the legal and ethical frameworks that govern our efforts to control such crimes must, therefore, must evolve to address these new crimes. It is a foregone conclusion that without involving AI at the forefront of these efforts, it will be impossible to counter AI-enabled crimes themselves. Hence the concomitant need to update the legal and ethical norms guiding society's conceptions of policing and crime prevention.Yet another implication is that AI also transforms the roles and responsibilities of police officers and other actors involved in crime prevention or response. As the examples show, AI can augment or automate some of the tasks that police officers perform, such as data collection, analysis, or evidence processing. AI can also assist or replace some of the decisions that police officers make, such as risk assessment, resource allocation, or intervention selection. To ensure that the concerns of effectiveness and responsibility surrounding Mx. Robo-Cop are adequately balanced, clear and consistent standards and regulations for police and state actors must be established side-by-side with the development and deployment of such systems. This is not to say that we need to disavow the use of AI in the field of policing and crime prevention. The potential and limitations of AI and the skills and knowledge to use it effectively and responsibly make it so versatile and terrifying. However, it is still a tool to be wielded by the legitimate wielder of the state's punitive power: the police.The use of AI in identifying young people who are vulnerable to gang exploitation or violence and mounting efforts to prevent them from becoming involved in crime is already a burning question in the UK. This recognises that leveraging AI to provide better targeted and tailored state support and services to at-risk groups or individuals, is valuable. On the face of it, any enhancements to their state's performance, efficiency, and accountability in this regard will be applauded. But given what we know about the pitfalls surrounding AI, the opposite also holds: violating the privacy, dignity, or rights of individuals or communities will reduce the trust and legitimacy that is essential for state actors and the police to be able to police under the social contract.Referring back to my previous post here, we know that AI can create or exacerbate the digital divide or systemic social inequalities among different groups or individuals. The conversation about the use of AI in a field where the slightest deviation from the limited scope of policing is undesirable must discuss the processes involved as well as the outcomes exacted upon the population being policed. This indicates the need to ensure that AI is used in a way that respects and protects the interests and values of individuals or communities. AI is a powerful tool that can help us understand the causes of, prevent, and reduce crime. Still, it is not a substitute for human judgment or responsibility. It is not merely a technology but also a socio-cultural phenomenon to be embraced with a healthy mixture of curiosity and caution. (I use the term ‘AI' to include machine learning, Neural Language Processing, etc., here for brevity.)Matsyanyaaya: Why a local Indian rickshaw app should worry Big Tech— Shailesh ChitnisDigital platforms, such as Google and Facebook for advertising and Amazon for e-commerce, derive their power by bringing sellers and buyers together in one place. Over time, "network effects" ensure that these platforms achieve monopoly power in the market. Regulators have tried different methods to limit the reach of these platforms. The European Union prefers a rule-based approach to reining in these companies, while the United States M+A policy is focused on preventing market concentration.Neither has worked particularly well. Namma Yatri, a small ride-hailing app in Bangalore, may point in another direction. Since its launch last November, the app lists almost a third of the city's 150,000-odd rickshaw drivers on its network and routes 40% of all rickshaw rides. It is now a viable competitor to Ola and Uber, the dominant apps.Namma Yatri is unique in that it is entirely funded and run by the community. The app is based on the open-source platform Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which is a non-profit supported by the Indian government. A private company, Juspay Technologies create the app, and there is no commission fee.ONDC's concept is to create a common platform where buyers and sellers can easily transact. This is essentially a technological solution that deconstructs a marketplace (see figure below). By abstracting the platform from supply and demand, ONDC seeks to remove some of the barriers of large digital platforms.ONDC's approach is not unique. Last week, Bluesky, a new social media platform backed by Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey, started inviting users to its Twitter-like platform. What makes it different is that the social network is built on a decentralized system. This would allow, in theory, users from multiple social networks, each with its own systems of curation and moderation to interact.A technology-driven solution that unbundles a marketplace into different pieces may spur more competition. And given India's success with pushing large-scale digital infrastructure projects, entrenched platforms should pay attention.Though it's early days for these platforms, there are a few questions, particularly around their business model.- Can a community-supported model work for India when our open-source culture isn't that well-developed?- If private companies are developing and maintaining applications on the platform, what are the monetization models?But perhaps, the most important question is about government intervention. With ONDC, if the government actively participates in defining the protocol and in advocating its use, does that influence innovation and natural market evolution?Antariksh Matters: Challenges for the Indian private space sector— Pranav R SatyanathThe approval of the new space policy by the Union Cabinet ushers in a new era for the space sector in India. The long-awaited reform, reflected in an 11-page document, details the activities that the commercial space sector can undertake and delineates the roles of three key government agencies: Indian National Space Promotion & Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and the Department of Space (DoS). We have covered the merits and shortcomings of the policy in a Takshashila blog. The enthusiasm for the growth of the private space sector is indeed merited, as private entities were largely denied these opportunities in the past. However, there also exists a host of challenges that the Indian private space sector will face in the future. Some of these challenges are rooted in the historical evolution of the space sector in India, while others are created by the structure of market competition in the space sector. To understand the challenges, we must first briefly analyse how the private space sector has evolved to its present state in India.Evolution of India's private space sectorPrivate sector participation in India's space sector has historically been sparse. This was because space activities were the state's monopoly for several decades, and ISRO had achieved several feats, such as developing indigenous launch vehicles with limited resources. Indeed, since space was a high-risk and relatively low-reward sector, private entities stayed away from undertaking entire space projects and instead played the role of contractors and subcontractors for manufacturing satellite and launch vehicle components.Given ISRO's monopoly over space activities, a regulatory mechanism to oversee national space activities was seen as unnecessary, even after commercial space activities became a viable undertaking for the private sector. ISRO became the de-facto regulator for the private sector as it was the only route through which the private sector could participate in space activities. The absence of a set regulatory framework, therefore, disincentivised major private sector participation.This affected the evolution of the private sector in three ways. First, due to the large capital required to establish  manufacturing facilities for the space sector, the task of taking the role of suppliers fell on the traditional heavy industries who had large resources at their disposal. Second, since the industries largely followed ISRO's guidelines on design and manufacturing, they had very little incentives to innovate on their own. Finally, an ancillary support industry or the space sector did not flourish as ISRO imported or manufactured key components in-horse. Put together, these factors would go on to place several structural constraints on India's private space sector.     The challenges for India's private space sectorWith clarity on the regulatory framework, the private space sector is free to pursue activities in both the Upstream sector (which includes satellite manufacturing and launch services) and the Downstream sector (Ground Segment and satellite services). However, the industry must overcome several hurdles before achieving a high degree of competitiveness. This essay focuses on two challenges that are discussed less frequently.Support from the governmentThe miniaturisation of satellites has given rise to a new market for satellite service providers, which has, in turn, spurred the demand for launch vehicles. Despite the boom in demand, the private space sector continues to rely on significant government funding to stay in business. For the NewSpace industry, support from the government comes in the form of purchasing services or directly funding the research and development of new technologies. Consider the example of the launch industry in the United States. Traditionally the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) purchased services from the established space and missile industry through a cost-plus arrangement. The rise of the private space launch market introduced a new fixed-cost model, where NASA and USAF paid for launches on a need basis. Furthermore, NASA has taken significant steps to involve the private industry in human spaceflight, as the national space agency has shaped itself to undertake high-risk exploration missions. The military sector has also taken major steps to integrate the private industry into the procurement ecosystem, making the government a major source of funding for the private space sector.Such a model of government funding does not exist in India. According to the new space policy, NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), an entity under the DoS, will take responsibility for operating launch vehicles developed by ISRO. Further, ISRO has also stated that it will develop a new reusable launch vehicle to replace the PSLV. There is no indication that either the DOS or the armed forces will fund private launch providers for launch services or develop new launchers.Due to the long absence of a commercial space policy, India's private space industry is in its nascent stages. As the industry matures, it will face stiff competition from well-established international players. In this regard, the Union government must be cognizant of the fact that international competitors have some level of backing from foreign governments, which skews their advantage in the international market. Access to key technologiesThe second major challenge to Indian companies arises from the lack of a robust supply ecosystem in India. As mentioned earlier, the evolution of India's space sector led to a condition where a supporting industry for the space sector had limited incentives to flourish into its full potential. Decades later, a new generation of space entrepreneurs began to rely on foreign suppliers for key components and technologies as they could not find equivalent suppliers domestically. The lack of a domestic space ecosystem has led several space entrepreneurs to shift their establishments to foreign countries, where access to technology, talent and support systems was easier.Indeed, the NewSpace ecosystem will eventually gain competence as the domestic industry begins to mature and the demand for domestically-manufactured sensors, optics, testing equipment and software increases. During the transition period, however, space startups will continue to rely on foreign suppliers. The process of procuring foreign components is often a roadblock due to the export control regime on dual-use technologies.Charging forwardWhile the new policy achieves high marks in several key areas, the transformation of India's space sector is far from complete. To achieve the vision of augmenting India's capabilities through the commercial space sector, India needs a  National Space Strategy which charts a clear path forward for both civilian and military activities. Such a strategy must lay down the objectives for India's space programme and seamlessly incorporate the interests of the commercial space sector into the national strategy.Our Reading Menu[Book] Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith[Report] Mapping Biosafety Level-3 Laboratories by Publications by Caroline Schuerger, Sara Abdulla and Anna Puglisi[Op-ed] CPC's tryst with private regulatory interventionism by Anushka Saxena[Podcast] Indian Space Policy - 2023 with Aditya Ramanathan and Narayan Prasad This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Many cab and auto-hailing apps have tried to challenge the might of Ola and Uber and have failed over the years. There's a new app called Namma Yatri that is doing something different and is acquiring more customers every day. Shailesh Chitnis and Bharath Reddy talk about the app and what's so different about it. Check out Takshashila's courses: https://school.takshashila.org.in/ Do follow IVM Podcasts on social media. We are @IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. https://twitter.com/IVMPodcasts https://www.instagram.com/ivmpodcasts/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/ivmpodcasts/ You can check out our website at https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/featured Follow the show across platforms: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon Music Do share the word with your folks!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the latest episode of our ONDC series! This week, we're diving into the exciting world of Buyer Apps and their potential to drive economic growth in India. To gain a deeper understanding, we had the pleasure of speaking with Sanjeev Kumar, the Co-Founder, ED & CEO at Spice Money. In this insightful conversation, Sanjeev shared his perspective on why ONDC is the future and how Spice Money is bringing it to rural areas. Tune in to learn more!

In our latest episode, we delve into the world of digital commerce and explore the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a revolutionary concept that has the potential to transform the ecommerce landscape in India. Our guest, Susmit Patodia, Director at Antler India, provides expert insights on the disruptive power of ONDC and its implications for both ecommerce and fintech in the country. Join us as we unpack the ONDC framework and discuss its key features, benefits, and challenges. From the potential to reduce transaction costs and increase interoperability to the potential to create 100 unicorns, we cover a wide range of topics that will be of interest to anyone interested in the future of digital commerce in India. What problem is ONDC trying to solve What ONDC is How does it work What does the ONDC landscape look like What the opportunity for Fintech is Why you should be gung-ho about ONDC Don't miss this informative and thought-provoking conversation on what could be a $80bn+ Opportunity! Additional reading Unpacking the $80+ billion ONDC opportunity: India's next startup catalyst Contact Susmit LinkedIn Twitter Email: susmit.patodia@antler.co Contact Antler Website LinkedIn Twitter

Amazon announced on February 24 that it will integrate its logistics network and SmartCommerce, a suite of SaaS products built on Amazon Web Services, with the government of India-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). Ericsson has announced the largest layoff in the telecom sector in the current economic slowdown, Reuters reports. Also in this brief, Nokia has announced the G22 – a smartphone with a backplate made from recycled plastic that can be removed easily for DIY repairs; and the latest on how India is stepping up its semiconductor efforts. Notes: Amazon will integrate its logistics network and SmartCommerce, a suite of SaaS products built on Amazon Web Services, with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), the open networks-based ecommerce protocols backed by the Indian government. “This will be Amazon's initial collaboration with ONDC as we continue to explore other potential opportunities for stronger integration between the two in future,” the company said in a press release on Feb. 24. In some smartphone news, Nokia has designed one of its next phones to make it easy for repairs, with a design that harkens back to the early years of mobile phones. The Nokia G22, developed by Finnish manufacturer HMD Global, is a standard smartphone with a 6.5-inch screen and a 50-megapixel main camera, but it's the phone's outer shell and insides that make it special, CNBC reports. The handset includes a recyclable plastic back which can be easily removed to swap out broken components, according to CNBC. With tools and repair guides from hardware repair advocacy firm iFixit, a user can remove and replace the phone's cover, battery, screen and charging port. More on Scandinavia, Telecom equipment maker Ericsson will lay off 8,500 employees globally as part of its plan to cut costs, Reuters reported on Feb. 24, citing a memo sent to employees and seen by the news agency. While technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Google have laid off tens of thousands of employees citing economic conditions, Ericsson's move would be the largest layoff to hit the telecoms industry, according to Reuters. In some semiconductor industry news, India's minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said last week that India Semiconductor Research Centre (ISRC), a private, industry-led research centre, will soon be launched and the existing Semiconductor Laboratory is being modernised and pivoted into a research fab that will be co-located with the ISRC. The minister was speaking at the opening of the second Semicon India FutureDESIGN Roadshow, on Feb. 24, in Bengaluru. The Government plans to introduce an educational curriculum as part of the Future Skills programme, Chandrasekhar said. “It has been developed in collaboration with industry experts and academics. A large number of colleges will have new degrees, new electives, and new certification programs in VLSI.” “We are actively working with fab companies to create on-the-job training type of internships for students in the semiconductor space,” he said, according to a government press release.

ในขณะที่การซื้อของผู้บริโภคเปลี่ยนไปทางออนไลน์มากขึ้นเรื่อยๆ การเปิดตัว Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) ของประเทศอินเดียจะทำให้ ecommerce เกิดการผูกขาดน้อยลง ที่สำคัญกว่านั้นคือสามารถสร้างแพลตฟอร์มการซื้อขายให้กับผู้ขายรายย่อยหลายล้านรายเพื่อเข้าถึงผู้ซื้อ การผูกขาด ecommerce บนแพลตฟอร์มปัจจุบันของอินเดีย ซึ่ง Amazon และ Flipkart เป็นเจ้าของโดย Walmart ควบคุม 60% ของตลาด ONDC จัดตั้งขึ้นโดยรัฐบาลในฐานะบริษัทไม่แสวงหาผลกำไรตามมาตรา 8 และกำลังทำงานในเมืองนำร่อง และมีเป้าหมายที่จะขยายทั่วอินเดียด้วยแพลตฟอร์มการซื้อขายดิจิทัลในเร็วๆ นี้  จากระบบที่ขับเคลื่อนโดยผู้ประกอบการซึ่งควบคุมโดยไม่กี่ราย ONDC จะข้ามแพลตฟอร์มเหล่านี้ไปเป็นเครือข่ายอำนวยความสะดวกที่เชื่อมโยงระหว่างผู้ซื้อและผู้ขาย  เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ ========================= ร่วมสนับสนุน ด.ดล Blog และ Geek Forever Podcast เพื่อให้เรามีกำลังใจในการผลิต Content ดี ๆ ให้กับท่าน https://www.tharadhol.com/become-a-supporter/ ——————————————– ติดตาม ด.ดล Blog ผ่าน Line OA เพียงคลิก : https://lin.ee/aMEkyNA ——————————————– ไม่พลาดข่าวสารผ่านทาง Email จาก ด.ดล Blog : https://www.getrevue.co/profile/tharadhol ——————————————– Geek Forever Club พื้นที่ของการแลกเปลี่ยนข้อมูลข่าวสาร ความรู้ ด้านธุรกิจ เทคโนโลยีและวิทยาศาสตร์ ใหม่ ๆ ที่น่าสนใจ https://www.facebook.com/groups/geek.forever.club/ ========================= ช่องทางติดตาม ด.ดล Blog เพิ่มเติมได้ที่ Fanpage : www.facebook.com/tharadhol.blog Blockdit : www.blockdit.com/tharadhol.blog Twitter : www.twitter.com/tharadhol Instragram : instragram.com/tharadhol TikTok : tiktok.com/@geek.forever Youtube : www.youtube.com/c/mrtharadhol Linkedin : www.linkedin.com/in/tharadhol Website : www.tharadhol.com

Predictions: 2023—RSJAs promised last week, let's get going with some predictions for 2023. Pranay likes to keep them very specific (for a good reason), while I get away with broad bets.Global EconomyThe problem with predicting anything on how things will unfold globally is the random big event that upends all forecasts. This has happened in the last three years. The impact of the pandemic waves and the Ukraine war is yet to play out fully. By themselves, it makes for difficult terrain for forecasts. I'm hoping we don't have another such event during the year.  #1 The trend of securing your supply chain for critical products will get stronger.Look, it is difficult to disentangle from the globally integrated supply chains that have been a feature of the economic model since the end of the Cold War. But it is clear to most large economies that on issues that concern national security, it will be foolhardy to not plan for worst-case scenarios any longer. And national security could mean anything, really, but I can see on energy and key technology, nations will opt for more secure supply chains with watertight bilateral partnerships than be at the mercy of distributed, multilateral chains. I won't go as far as calling it ‘de-globalisation' yet, but this ‘gated globalisation' is a trend that's here to stay. What this will mean in concrete terms is there will be a gathering of pace on bilateral treaties among larger economies on these issues that reduces dependence on China or Russia. For India, there are a couple of issues here. How to continue to balance the purchase of oil from Russia for its energy security without inviting sanctions from the west? It has managed this well in the last year. The other issue is to find alternatives to Russian hardware for its defence machinery without rubbing it the wrong way. We have batted for free trades on these pages for a long time. So, it is concerning to see this retreat, but history has shown over time, geopolitics trumps geoeconomics. #2 The fears of elevated inflation and a recession in the US in 2023 are overblown. The recession is due, but it will come a bit laterI have made the point here earlier too. The Fed has gone overboard on inflation targeting with more rate cuts than necessary and not waiting for their impact to come through. The moderation of inflation in the past few months (though at 3.6 per cent, it is still higher than the target) suggests that the Fed has been partly successful and it should continue to remain hawkish. I am not so sure. It takes time for rate hikes to start impacting demand, and my suspicion is that the current moderation in inflation was due in any case. The impact on rate hikes on subduing demand and growth is yet to play out. My view is that as supply chain issues ease up with China opening up, energy demand going up and the US continuing to be at almost full employment, we might have a 2023 where for the most part, the US inflation will be higher than target, Fed will continue to remain hawkish, and the growth will hold up. This will mean the real risk of recession will be more toward the end of the year than now. #3 Big Tech will continue to be under the cosh Three problems look to exacerbate in the tech space in 2023. First, the valuation of ad-driven economic models and the insane optimism about the distributed ledger, crypto, DAO or independent sovereigns (yeah, remember that) will abate. A lot of value has been destroyed in the last year (esp in public markets), and I still think there's more to go in the private market valuations. This correction will weigh on markets, fund raises and investments into startups. Second, global markets will shrink for Big Tech as more countries will place restrictions on how deep they will allow them to own commerce or payment infrastructure. I half expect India to gradually move all payment and eCommerce arms of Big Tech into a structure that's domestically controlled and owned in 2023. Third, FTC, with Hina Khan at the helm, will accelerate antitrust and competition law changes to reduce the dominance of Big Tech. Some of these measures will be significant overreach in my opinion, but I see more executive orders in this space. Conversely, I see significant hype building up on AI platforms during the year. Like every hype cycle we will have people going overboard on AI, but I think this is one trend where in the classic sense, we might be overestimating the impact in the near term and underestimating it in the long term. AI will eventually get us a driverless car, but it will get to the mediocre creator economy faster. The jobs under immediate threat aren't that of cab drivers and factory workers. The average copywriter, reporter and illustrator are in greater peril. It will be interesting to see how these groups who have a greater share of voice in the media will tackle the threat of AI in 2023. Indian Economy#1 Greater optimismI am a bit more optimistic about the broader numbers than most, and I will explain why. I think GDP growth will come in around 6.5 per cent for FY24, and inflation will be around 5 per cent. We might see a couple of rate hikes in the next few months, taking the repo rate to 6.75 per cent, but that will be it. I see even a small possibility of a rate hike cut in the later part of the year to spur growth with an eye on Lok Sabha elections in May ‘24. We have corporate balance sheets that are strong, banks across the board are well provided for, and inflation hasn't gone out of control. I see domestic consumption to remain strong and exports, in the light of the shift away from China, to be good for manufacturers, and how much ever I might struggle to get behind the PLI scheme, it will yield some short-term benefits. IT exports might be a dampener, but on balance, I see more upside to these predictions. Of course, the risks are another global one-off event, oil prices going up and restrictions on accessing Russian oil and a bad monsoon. But those aside, I foresee India standing out as an outperformer thanks in no part to many cards falling into place for it often without its own efforts. But then why look the gift horse in the mouth?#2 Digitalisation: Wave 2 There will be a significant push on digitalisation in lending and eCommerce. The UPI infrastructure has revolutionised payments and, along with GST, has accelerated the formalisation of the economy. The benefits of these have so far been more skewed towards the government in terms of tax collections. I think we will see a focused push for the next round of benefits with platforms like OCEN (lending) and ONDC (eCommerce). The data that's available because of the digital rails, the account aggregator framework that's live now with banks and the groundwork done in getting small suppliers onboard on ONDC - these prerequisites are now available for the next order benefits of digitalisation for customers. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier point, doing this will also mean shifting the balance of power from Big Tech-owned entities to an open platform or domestically controlled entities. I sense a strong push in this direction in 2023.#3 The expected capex cycle push from the government will not come. There are a couple of reasons for it. First, this government has always been careful about fiscal deficit, and it is particular about the risk of the fiscal space. The government has committed to a 4.5 per cent target for the union government deficit in the next 3 years from the current levels, that's expected to be 6.4 per cent. I see a tightening in the fiscal stance during the year with a gradual reduction in some of the pandemic-related subsidies and better targeting of the benefits improving distribution efficiency. The other reason for a muted capex spend is the likely belief that the private sector credit capex cycle seems to be picking up. These are early days for it, but the data for the past two quarters shows an uptick in corporate credit pickup and an increase in interest costs in the balance sheet. The benefits of the corporate tax cut in 2019 are now seen in strong corporate profits in FY23 for most sectors. That, plus the belief that the rate cycle has almost peaked, could mean the private capex cycle could strengthen during the year. I expect the MSME sector to gain from strength to strength on the back of China+1, PLI-like schemes and easier access to credit because banks are in better shape. MSME is the story of the next decade.India Political and Social#1 More of the sameThe expected consolidation of opposition forces to counter the BJP isn't going to happen early enough for it to mount a credible challenge in 2024. There are eight state elections in 2023, and I suspect BJP will see reverses or very close fights in a couple of them where it is the incumbent (MP and Karnataka). But LS elections aren't any longer an agglomeration of many smaller elections like they used to be pre-2014. So, I don't see an upheaval in national politics in 2023 that will make a meaningful dent in 2024. This is a pity because we have reached a stage of single-party dominance of polity and media, which isn't healthy for democracy in the medium term. But it is hard to see opposition consolidation or a credible case that they can make to counter the electoral juggernaut of the BJP at this time. Congress, the other national party, isn't capable of moving the masses either with its agenda or its leadership. The vacuum in national politics looks set to stay.#2 More Exit, Less VoiceI have made the point in the past about social fault lines tripping us up while we magically have a growth window that's opened up for us again. This holds true. The space for opposition or dissent has shrunk; more importantly, even the fight for protecting or broadening that space has gone out. As Hirshman (in Exit, Voice and Loyalty) asked in the context of the relationship between the state and its citizens: the citizen has the choice to either voice their disapproval when dissatisfied or exit from the state. The state would be dependent on citizens if they value their loyalty and would then pursue a policy that listens to their voice. However, if the state doesn't value it and the citizens know their voice won't matter, the only option is to exit. For certain sections of our citizenry, we are possibly at this stage of engagement with the state. This scenario might not hurt the majority today, but we would do well to remember it has never been a good idea for the state to not value the loyalty of its citizenry in the long run.  An Excerpt from Missing in Action: Why Should You Care About Public Policy— A chapter from our upcoming book that releases on 23rd JanuaryChapter 11: When the State Owns What's YoursA typical scene in those old Bollywood films with a rural setting was that of the zamindar standing with his ‘not-so- smart' (naalayak) offspring on the terrace of their haveli and telling him:Yahan se jahaan tak tumhari nazar jaati hai, woh saari zameen hamari hai![All the land that you can see from here belongs to us.]In reality, the only zamindar who can make such a claim in modern India is the Indian State.A fundamental concept underlying economic reasoning and public policy is the property rights system. To an Indian, the phrase ‘right to property' conjures up the image of a rapacious zamindar exploiting peasants. This narrative has fostered a zero-sum perception—owning property is assumed to have occurred in the context of the violation of someone else's human rights. This perception has, in turn, meant that the enforcement of property rights has always been weak in India. Once a fundamental right, the right to property under the Indian Constitution was deprecated to a constitutional right by the 44th amendment. Now the State can go about violating an individual's right over their property, as long as it can couch this takeover is being done under vaguely defined ‘public interest'.Why Is a Functional Property Rights System Necessary?A property right is an exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used. This applies not just to land but to any physical or intellectual property such as your phone, your water bottle, or your innovation. Such a right can be held by a person, a group of persons, or the State.When this exclusive authority over someone's resources is protected—by the State or society—the owners can be confident of deploying and improving the quality of their owned resource instead of spending their energy in feverishly protecting the resource from being stolen by another entity. Moreover, giving an exclusive authority to someone to enjoy the use of a resource changes the nature of competition itself, bringing it into the realm of social acceptability. For example, without property rights, entities might compete over a common resource by resorting to means such as intimidation, denial, and distancing. But once it is demonstrated that the authority over a resource will be protected, competition shifts to owners improving their offering to win more buyers. Finally, a strong property rights system also enables the exchange and sharing of resources, as resource owners can be confident that their ultimate ownership is secure.Now this sounds quite theoretical and straight out of an economic reasoning textbook, which this book is not. So, to understand how pivotal the concept of a well-functioning property rights system is, we turn to an Indian story of violation of these rights. By understanding what happens when property rights are denied, we might better appreciate their importance.Daastaan-e-SandalwoodThe story of sandalwood production in India is as intriguing as it is frustrating. The wood is used for its timber. The oil extracted from its roots is used in perfumes, incense, soaps, and medicines. In India, sandalwood has a special religious significance as well.As hopeful consumers, many of you would have heard about the astronomical costs of this wood. Many of you would have also heard about brigands such as Veerappan who gained Robinhood status by smuggling sandalwood. Some of you might have been duped into buying ordinary scented wood being passed off as sandalwood. But few of us realize that the strand that connects these stories is misguided State action.Generally, the price of a commodity is indicative of its natural scarcity, but that's not the case here. Nearly 90 per cent of the world's sandalwood resources are available in the three Indian states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. And yet, the production of sandalwood in India has declined sharply. In 1965–70, annual production stood at 4000 tonnes. By 1999–2000, it had decreased by half. And by 2019, it had become just 200 tonnes. Other countries supplied a total of 400 tonnes in the same year, while the total global demand is estimated to be nearly 6000 tonnes a year. This massive demand–supply gap has made sandalwood so costly that it is often referred to as ‘red gold'.The drastic fall in sandalwood supply from India can be explained by a long history of denial of property rights. In fact, State interference in growing, producing, and selling sandalwood has a history of nearly 230 years in India. Here's how the story goes.Sandalwood was in huge demand even during colonial times, especially in China. The East India Company— never one to miss a trading opportunity—aimed to exploit the resources in southern India and export them to China. The problem was that much of the sandalwood-growing area fell under the kingdom of Mysore, led by Tipu Sultan. Recognizing the commercial value of this resource, Tipu Sultan forbade his subjects from trading in the wood with the Britishers in 1786. To take this idea further, he decreed sandal as a ‘royal tree', monopolizing sandalwood trade in 1792. Thus began, out of good intentions, the story of sandalwood's decline.Eventually, this sandalwood trade blockade became one of the primary causes of the Anglo-Mysore Wars. Once the Britishers took control, they were only happy to continue the sandalwood trade monopoly. The conception of sandalwood as a source of government revenue strengthened. Fast forward to Independence and we see that such was the lure of the scented wood that subsequent Indian governments followed the same policy of denying property rights to sandalwood growers. Even when the tree was located on private land, it belonged to the state government, and the owner of the land was required to make a declaration of the number of trees on his land. The forest officer could enter any private land and cut the trees and the range forest officer was supposed to give 75 per cent of the value as decided by the officer. Landholders were to be held responsible for damage or theft of any tree even though they had no exclusive authority over it. Violators could be imprisoned and fined. Further, in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, it was necessary to get a licence to store, sell, and process sandalwood. Possession of sandalwood in excess of twenty kilograms was made an offence.Unsurprisingly, the complete disregard for property rights meant that no one was interested in growing sandalwood on their land. It became a liability to be gotten rid of rather than an asset to be invested in. After all, who would want to be accountable for a resource whose fruits of labour they cannot enjoy?The result was a steep fall in production. But the story didn't end there. Given that the demand for wood was still high, a thriving black market emerged. With supply from cultivators choked off by government policy, smuggling the wood growing in government-controlled forests became a lucrative opportunity. Such were the profits to be made that the government could not protect sandalwood smuggling from these forests. When governments created armies of forest guards and personnel to ‘protect' the forests, many forest staff colluded with smugglers, further causing the depletion of the resource. Eventually, this smuggling business paved the way for the likes of Veerappan, who moved away from the riskier ‘business' of killing elephants to the far-more profitable sandalwood smuggling.After decades of this failed policy of denying property rights, governments recognized their mistake in 2001, when the Karnataka government allowed private players to grow and own sandalwood. Tamil Nadu followed suit in 2002. But this recognition of exclusive authority remains incomplete. The government continued to monopolize demand, which meant that farmers could only sell the sandalwood back to the government. Realizing that this was still a major stumbling block, the Karnataka government further liberalized sandalwood policy in 2009. Now, the growers could sell their wood directly to semi-government corporations such as Karnataka State Handicrafts Development Corporation (KSHDC) and Karnataka Soaps and Detergents Limited (KSDL). Apparently, KSDL offers a non-negotiable sum of Rs 3500 per kg of sandalwood. The company then turns around and sells the product for nearly Rs 16,000. Even today, farmers are not free to sell to other private players or export their produce.Meanwhile, Australia, which had its own native sandalwood, shifted to the Indian variant in 1998, introduced genetically engineered high-yield varieties, and beat India at its own game. So much so that India now imports Australian sandalwood for the sandalwood oil industry!The TakeawayThe sad sandalwood story illustrates that denial of property rights took away a shot at prosperity for thousands of ordinary farmers. One of the key components of liberty is economic freedom. Denial of this core freedom to individuals by the State or the society is a cruel act that perpetuates poverty. The State shouldn't be let off easily when it abridges this basic right.The hope is that learning from the mistakes of previous generations, many states in India have now adopted liberal policies for sandalwood production. This shouldn't be seen as isolated policy reform. The principle that needs to be internalized is that the State should focus on the protection of property rights of individuals instead of usurping them.India Policy Watch: The Old Debate about Colonial Rule in IndiaInsights on current policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneEarlier in the month, I chanced upon this Al Jazeera article, in which two historians have a new data point to illustrate the damage inflicted by British colonial rule on India. They find that “Britain's exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period.” Claims of this nature keep surfacing fairly regularly in our public discourse. In recent times, a reason has been the recurring debate in current-day Britain over the legacy of the British Empire. Even as that country is a much smaller power today and one that continues to be outpaced by other competitors, there is understandably a tendency to indulge in colonial nostalgia. From a realist perspective, the colonial period was indeed Britain's moment of glory. In response to this colonial nostalgia, Marxist scholars keep reminding us of numbers and narratives to explain how British rule was ruthless, inhuman, and detrimental to India. Another reason the debate finds a fresh lease of life is that Indian nationalists of various hues resurface the sone ki chidiya narrative — that India was rich and wealthy before the Britishers came here; it was only the British rule that impoverished us. Some even talk about reparations as a way to address—even if to a small extent—the problematic legacy of colonialism. Shashi Tharoor's 2017 book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India falls under this category. I, too, have caught myself resorting to this trope in casual conversations — the causal chain of reasoning for many of India's problems intuitively ends up with British Rule. We now know that these extreme claims are not all accurate. For instance, consider the economic deprivation argument. The oft-repeated claim is that India made up a quarter of the world's GDP before the Britishers set foot here, and by the time they left, India made up just 4 per cent of the world GDP, a sure sign of loot, plunder, and deliberate deprivation. But now we know better. India's GDP per capita in 1500 was still $500 (in constant 1900 dollars), far below that of contemporary powers such as China ($600) and Europe ($800). In the pre-industrialised world, GDP was a simple function of the population, as there were minor differences in productivity. We comprised 25 per cent of the world GDP only because India was one political populous unit, not because we were rich. The industrial revolution brought in a step-jump in productivity in Europe, and the divergence in incomes became a giant gap by the 1900s. While it might well be true that some part of the divergence resulted from British policies in India, the contribution of the intellectual, industrial, and social revolutions in Western Europe played a much bigger part in accelerating growth there. Moreover, we also know that the period between 1870 and 1913 saw the fastest growth in pre-independence India. On the other hand, economic historians such as Tirthankar Roy have repeatedly highlighted that the economic consequences of colonial rule are, at best mixed. His two books on the Economic History of India, covering the periods 1707-1857 and 1857-1947, authoritatively demonstrate three points. One, the Britishers could sweep across the subcontinent because many sections of Indians found them to be the best among all available alternatives. Two, British rule did bring in some benefits as well. Regardless of intentions, policies such as a consolidated tax system and Railways did have positive consequences. And three, it is difficult to estimate if famines and loot were substantially higher in the British era than in the past because comparable data for the latter simply doesn't exist. From a consequentialist lens, none of these counterarguments should surprise us. As we know, even the worst of social experiments do have some positives, and even the most well-intentioned policies also make some people worse off. Just like COVID-19 also had some small unexpected positive changes, British rule too had some positive outcomes.Despite these counter-arguments, the simpler stories that suggest “British plunder doomed India” are likely to stay dominant. That's because historical accuracy is not the most important consideration while discussing colonialism. Modern Indian nationalism grew out of the shared anti-colonial experience, and putting the blame on the “conniving” Britishers was important for forging unity amongst Indians. So, this narrative is really about nation-building rather than deepening our historical understanding.In today's times, the argument for reparations seems anachronistic. India is a bigger (definitely not richer) economy than the UK today. The UK PM himself is of Indian origin. The future prospects of India are far brighter than that of the UK. Given how far India has already come, these reparations arguments do not make any sense beyond an ointment for our emotional wounds. In fact, doubling down on this colonial loot argument can be counter-productive. India needs the West's help to increase its own national power vis-a-vis China. Just as China benefited from movements of goods, services, labour and capital from the West, we need them too. The more we keep harking back to emotional arguments against colonialism, the more difficult it becomes to adjust to the reality that the West remains indispensable for India. People's intentions in the past matter very little for future policymaking. HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters* [Article] This Mint article captures the main fallacy behind the sone ki chidiya narrative.* [Article] A good summary of Tirthankar Roy's two books on the economic history of India. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners in conversation with Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.Listen to the podcast to learn about02:00 - FinTech is a Gift That Keeps on Giving07:00 - FLDG, The Regulator & The Regulated10:00 - How to Partner with Banks16:00 - Flow based lending & New Opportunities25:00 - Opportunities in Infrastructure for Banking30:00 - Co-Creation & Big OpportunitiesClick here to read the full transcriptWant to learn more about about the India Opportunity & India Stack? Listen to this episode with Shireesh Joshi, Chief Business Office ONDC where we talk about ONDC: Interoperability & Unbundling, Why will Customers use ONDC?, Business models, Unsolved Areas and New Opportunities, Success Metrics for ONDC and a lot more. Enjoyed the podcast? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you are listening to this.Follow Prime Venture Partners:Twitter: https://twitter.com/Primevp_inLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp/ This podcast is for you. Do let us know what you like about the podcast, what you don't like, the guests you'd like to have on the podcast and the topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes. Please share your feedback here: https://primevp.in/podcastfeedback

In this episode of Backstage With Millionaires, Caleb discusses ONDC with founders of Gogappi, Arvind Sekhar and Samhitha Kotaamasu, one of India's first ONDC buyer apps. Gogappi is one of the first startups on ONDC. ONDC is short for Open Network for Digital Commerce, it is an initiative by the government of India to promote an open network for exchange of goods and services over the Internet. This basically means that the government is trying to create a level playing field for all the small business owners in India. ONDC is promising same power and features to these small owners that big e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon have. ONDC can be a game changer for these small businesses as now you won't have to pay anything to reach all these customers. All you have to do is list yourself with ONDC and customers across the country can find you from any application of their choice. The government has compared this with ‘hypertext transfer protocol for information exchange over the internet' where you could reach millions of customers without spending anything. Next big issue right now for D2C brands is efficient inventory management. ONDC promises to solve this by standardizing operations like cataloging, inventory management, order management and order fulfillment. This would mean that as a small seller, you could use any ONDC compatible application and you don't have to worry about managing everything on your own. It will be interesting to see how ONDC unfolds in India. An open network for doing business will certainly give confidence to millions of retailers and small brand owners to come online and do business and we could see thousands of unicorns in the future just from taking this direct-to-customer approach. However, we as buyers have become very comfortable and spoiled with the services provided by these e-commerce giants, from order tracking to return and refund, we tend to get aggrieved with every small issue we face. And this would be a challenge for ONDC to solve.

We tried ONDC. Here's how it went. Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwmillionaires/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/backstagewithmillionaires/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backstagewithmillionaires/ Discord: https://discord.gg/XySGGhXKep Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bwmillionaires

Today, each e-Commerce business owns the entire value chain of a transaction but ONDC or Open Network for Digital Commerce proposes to make a platform in which different players can own different parts of the value chain. Through this approach, ONDC aims to make e-Commerce more inclusive and accessible! Vani interviews Shireesh Joshi, captain of the ONDC ship. Listen on!

There are literally hundreds of people who you should be listening to talking about the ambitious ONDC project - ecommerce experts, government officials, antitrust lawyers. But instead, you chose to listen to three rambling fools just trying to make as many puns as possible. And that's why we love you. Anyway, you might have heard of the Open Network for Digital Commerce, the much-vaunted "UPI of ecommerce" the government launched earlier this year. What is it, how does it work, and... Will it work? The armchair experts that are the Chuck, Naren and Tony explore. And yes, Naren's ice cream makes a return.A really good video that actually explains ONDC (not as many puns though) is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp8NgDOT-tMAdd one part news, one part bad jokes, one part Wikipedia research, one part cult references from spending too much time on the internet, one part Wodehouse quotes, and one part quality puns, and you get Simblified.A weekly podcast to help you appear smarter, to an audience that knows no less! Your four hosts - Chuck, Naren, Srikeit, and Tony attempt to deconstruct topics with humor (conditions apply). Fans of the show have described it as "fun conversations with relatable folks", "irreverent humor", "the funniest thing to come out of Malad West" and "if I give you a good review will you please let me go".Started in 2016 as a creative outlet, Simblified now has over 200 episodes, including some live ones, and some with guests who are much smarter than the hosts. Welcome to the world of Simblified!You can contact the hosts on:Chuck: twitter.com/chuck_gopal / instagram.com/chuckofalltradesNaren: twitter.com/shenoyn / instagram.com/shenoynvTony: twitter.com/notytony / instagram.com/notytonySrikeit: twitter.com/srikeit / instagram.com/srikeit

This week in Indian Startup News: UPI is off to International markets, ONDC launches its Beta tests!, Meesho crosses Amazon in festive sale orders. UPI is off to International markets: 1. On 3rd of April, 2020, the NPCI registered a subsidiary company called NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) with a motive to make UPI an internationally accepted and used payments service. The NIPL's primary focus is to make UPI and RuPay as widely accepted as possible and it seems like they are on the right track in doing so. 2. A lot of countries across the globe have already adopted UPI as an accepted form of payment in their country. These include Singapore, France, UAE, The UK, Russia, Nepal, and all of the other countries that you are seeing on your screen. And on top of this, NPCI International is also in talks with 30 more countries for the adoption of UPI in which 3 have already signed MoU regarding the same. ONDC launches beta tests!: 1. ONDC's is not yet available in every city or pan-India as it is still in its pilot stage but the beta tests which launched on 30th September, 2022 are currently live in 86 cities which include cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, Bhopal and Lucknow. 2. The first app that went live on ONDC was Paytm Mall. This also means that almost all Bengaluru-based users can now order products online from various sellers that are listed on the ONDC via the Paytm app. Funding this week: This week at least 6 Indian Startups raised more than $1 Million, in total raising $328 Mn. These are the top three- 1. Meesho raised $192 Million 2. Euler motors raised $60 Mn 3. Byju's raised $49 Million Quick Update: Meesho beats Amazon in festive order volumes! 1. Flipkart continues to lead the festive season sale with an order sale share of whopping 49%. But, for a change the second spot is now held by Meesho instead of Amazon with a sale share of 21%. 2. Now, this data is only for the first week so there's a chance that Amazon can catch up in the coming weeks but it's interesting to see that what has always been an Amazon vs Flipkart fight is now witnessing a third player, Meesho.

It's Midweek Madness on Think Fast with a long list of different things happening around the world. We cross yet another record of a long introduction with some interesting stories beginning with how Varun looks similar to Hritik Roshan in Vikram Vedha. Varun & Suchita further discuss Tesla's new Optimus robot, Trevor Noah quitting 'The Daily Show' and apparently dating Dua Lipa, some stats around recently concluded EComm sales, ONDC setting up a store in Bengaluru, subscription social media ft. Social Home, Uniqlo profiting in the Indian market, Reliance Retail launches Zara competitor, Pharell Willams' company 'Joopiter', Razorpay acquires Poshvine, and Netflix's gaming studio. They deep dive into the following 2 stories: How Cinema from South India has gained popularity pan India, and how films are now not restricted to just language/region but accessibility has made sure everyone appreciates a good film irrespective. How TATA made good business decisions and minted a unicorn with Caratlane. Suchita recommends a podcast: On with Kara Swisher Varun's suggestion: Kara Swisher & Bob Iger (Ex Disney) interview Varun recommends a book: Discipline is Destiny by Ryan HolidayVarun & Suchita also answer a few listener questions on the show. Do share yours on the below-mentioned handles.You can follow Varun Duggirala on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/varunduggi and on Instagram at https://instagram.com/varunduggiYou can follow Suchita Salwan on Twitter at https://twitter.com/suchitasalwan and on Instagram at https://instagram.com/suchitasalwanCheck out video episodes on the Think Fast YouTube Channel.Find the show across audio streaming apps:Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | JioSaavn | Gaana | Amazon MusicDo follow IVM Podcasts on social media.We are @IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the new and improved IVM Podcasts App on Android or iOS.

Welcome to #85th episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. Today we have Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discussing -  1. ONDC launch in Bangalore2. Adobe acquires Figma3. Zomato cracks down on cloud kitchen4. National Logistics Policy5. ED freezes WazirX and Ethereum token ------------------------------------- Connect with Us: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup​​ ------------------------------------- If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode!

This week in Indian Startup News, OYO has filed for an IPO, UPI can now be used in credit cards too, ONDC beta testing to begin soon, Co-founder of Zepto, recently emerged as the youngest Indian to have a net worth of over Rs 1,000 crore in a survey. 00:12 Introduction 02:37 OYO filed for an IPO 03:50 UPI can now be linked to Credit Card 03:53 Sponsored Segment 04:57 Bird's Eye Segment 07:12 Quick Updates OYO has become EBITDA positive for the first time since its registration in 2012. The company saw its EBITDA margins rise to +0.5% in quarter 1 of FY23 from -9% in FY22. This is because they have managed to cut off a lot of expenses. The narrowing of losses has also prompted OYO to file fresh documents for its IPO with SEBI. It's a speculation that they are looking to go public at the end of October, somewhere around Diwali. RuPay credit cards can now be linked to UPI! Yes, you heard right, now you can use your RuPay credit card to do UPI transactions. Well, this is just a pilot as of now, and hence, has only been launched for customers of Punjab National Bank, Union Bank of India, and Indian Bank. The pilot phase will be centered on extracting ‘actionable learnings' from the operations. The project will be scaled up with time to include other banks and to increase usage. Funding this week: This week at least 10 Indian Startups raised more than $1 Million, in total raising $161 Mn. Zopper raised $75 Million Bhanzu raised $15 Mn Join Venture raised $23.5 Million Urban Company FY22 Loss Widens 2X To INR 514 Cr but the Operating Revenue increases upto 77%. 19 yr old Kaivalya Vohra, the co-founder of Zepto, recently emerged as the youngest Indian to have a net worth of over Rs 1,000 crore in a survey.

Building the next wave of technology. Today my guest is seasoned investor Nitin Sharma, general partner & co-founder of Antler India. A global early-stage venture capital firm that invests in the defining technology companies of tomorrow. They're one of the fastest growing VC firms in the world. In this episode he talks about his 15+ year investing experience. He talks about how they help early stage founders. He talks about the differences between American entrepreneurs and Indian entrepreneurs. Talks about the No1 mistake founders make after raising money and how he deals with startup failure. He talks about Web3, Metaverse, Fintech and ONDC.  Gives important advice if you want to become an investor.  And finally he talks about the importance of mentorship and gives great startup advice based on Aristotle's persuasion triangle (character,emotion, logic)In this conversation we also talk about:His first year (2008) as a VCHow many startups they invest in and how muchHow to help founders with the residency program.Values, vision and skills.Going global from day onePitching advice (why you & why now?)The importance of building a global network.Validating ideas.Dealing with new technologiesBeing passionate but not emotional.and much more!linkshttps://www.antler.co/indiaCheck out Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design, business, tech, and more. Anyone can join the millions of members in our community to learn cutting-edge skills, network with peers and discover new opportunities. Join for free for 1 month and access all my classes!https://www.skillshare.com/en/r/user/neilpatel?gr_tch_ref=on&gr_trp=onmusic by Punch Deck.https://open.spotify.com/artist/7kdduxAVaFnbHJyNxl7FWV

This week in Indian Startup News, Instant Grocery Delivery startups extend their delivery time, Byju's losses pile up, ONDC beta testing to begin soon, Lido learning files for bankruptcy. 00:00 Introduction 00:30 Instant Grocery Delivery startups extend their delivery time 03:33 Byju's losses pile up 04:30 Bird's Eye Segment 06:13 ONDC beta testing to begin soon 06:38 Lido learning files for bankruptcy 06:50 Sponsored Segment 08:15 BWM Update Instant Grocery Delivery startups extend their delivery time: Zepto, Dunzo, Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart are now testing pilots for late night deliveries. These pilots are only available for selected markets in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Chennai. They are doing this mainly because Indian customers tend to stay up late, and when they stay up late, they tend to order snacks and other eatables in the night. This would give extra business to these companies. Byju's losses pile up: Byju's, world's biggest ed-tech company, has posted their financials a couple of days ago after delaying it for almost an year; and it's not looking good. They reported a loss of 576 million dollars in FY21 from 29 million dollars in FY20, that's a massive increase of 1,880% or 19.8X. Company's total revenue declined by 3.3% from 315 million dollars to 305 million dollars. The main reason for this loss is acquisitions and marketing. 1/4th of the losses are because of WhiteHat Jr, a code learning platform which Byju's acquired back in 2021, which reported a loss of 212 million dollars alone. Funding this week: This week at least 10 Indian Startups raised more than $1 Million, in total raising $143.8 Mn. Yulu raised $82 Million Agritech startup Akshayakalpa raised $15 Mn Deeptech startups raised $21 Million ONDC beta testing to begin soon: ONDC beta testing will begin at the end of September. The beta testing is likely to take place in Bengaluru, said ONDC CEO. Lido learning files for bankruptcy: Lido Learning has filed for bankruptcy! Lido failed to pay off debts payable to its ex-employees, customers, vendors, lenders and sundry creditors.

This is Part 2 of the series where we discuss India's Digital Infrastructure.Here are our Research Notes for the episode. Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC has been in the news lately. Currently, online marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal) follow a platform model. In this model, they have end-to-end control over the entire e-commerce transaction process, right from seller on-boarding, customer acquisition, order fulfilment, complaint redressal, and managing payments. Right now, all these processes are being controlled by a single entity.ONDC's open network will 'unbundle' or break down this complex system of small activities into separate micro-services that can be addressed separately by any entity. These organisations can chooses to perform one or more of these activities. As a result, the proponents of ONDC say that if it is successful, ONDC will democratize e-commerce, increase competition and accelerate growth.If it is democratised, one big change through ONDC will be that it caps referral commissions for platforms that send shoppers to a seller at just 3% – much less than the roughly 30% cut charged by Amazon, Flipkart and others.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)------------------------------------------------------**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce busiensses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!------------------------------------------------------Here are some research notes that we compiled or referred to for this episode:Jefferies Report about ONDC - tonne of details not available elsewhere.Twitter Thread by Aditya Kondawar - helped us structure our thoughts.

Shireesh Joshi, Chief Business Office ONDC chats with Gaurav Ranjan, VP Investments  Prime Venture Partners.Listen to the podcast to learn about04: 15 - ONDC: Interoperability & Unbundling16:15 -  Why will Customers  use ONDC?29:30  -  “ONDC is not a finished product. It is a capability”31:00 - Business models, Unsolved Areas and New Opportunities42:30 - Success Metrics for ONDC Click here to read the full transcriptEnjoyed learning about ONDC? Next listen to Dilip Asbe, MD & CEO of NPCI talk about UPI: Origins, Growth & Future https://primevp.in/content/podcast/internationalisation-upi-programmable-money-business-models-new-opportunities-dilip-asbe-md-ceo-npci/Enjoyed the podcast? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you are listening to this.Follow Prime Venture Partners:Twitter: https://twitter.com/Primevp_inLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp/ This podcast is for you. Do let us know what you like about the podcast, what you don't like, the guests you'd like to have on the podcast and the topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes. Please share your feedback here: https://primevp.in/podcastfeedback

In today's episode for 6th September 2022, we see why Bernstein thinks Amazon may have a tough road ahead of them. If you want to read our explainer on ONDC, please click this link - https://bit.ly/3RVfy6L.

This week in Indian Startup News, Zomato just launched an Intercity Food Delivery Pilot, Indian Govt to promote over 10,000 startups, NPCI looking to pick 9-10% stake in ONDC. 00:00 Introduction 00:13 Zomato just launched an Intercity Food Delivery Pilot 02:21 Bird's Eye Segment 03:12 Sponsored Segment 06:14 Indian Govt to promote over 10,000 startups 07:09 NPCI looking to pick 9-10% stake in ONDC 08:30 BWM Team Update Zomato just launched an Intercity Food Delivery Pilot: Food delivery company Zomato has launched a service called 'Intercity Legends' that will let users order dishes and delicacies from famous outlets and restaurants in other cities. For now, service is limited to South Delhi and Gurugram. People living in these areas will be able to enjoy rosogollas from Kolkata, biryani from Hyderabad, and kebabs prepared in Lucknow. In a latest statement, Zomato's CEO Deepinder Goyal said that Zomato is going to show profits soon and that he is very enthusiastic about it. Funding this week: This week at least 9 Indian startups raised more than $145 Million. Bike Bazaar raised $52.8 Million Genome research startup MedGenome raised $50 Mn Fintech startups - Early Salary raised $13 Million Indian Govt to promote over 10,000 startups: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary Alkesh Kumar Sharma said that the government is looking to promote more than 10,000 startups in the coming five to six years under its GENESIS - that's an acronym for Gen-Next Support for Innovative Startups - initiative. So, Digital India GENESIS is a deeptech startup platform that will help tech startups largely from Tier-II, III cities. MeitY has already partnered with 22 accelerators under Centre's SAMRIDH. NPCI looking to pick stake in ONDC: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is looking to pick a 9-10% stake in the government's digital commerce initiative, the Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC which is a government owned open source platform. NPCI manages the digital payments network of UPI and its CEO, Dilip Asbe, is also a part of the advisory council of ONDC.

You probably would have read/heard about ONDC recently and wondered, what is ONDC? How is it going to change your life? Is ONDC going to be the next UPI?In this week's podcast, I & Krishna R catch up with Amey Sahasrabuddhe(PM@Flipkart) and talk about this new kid in town. Check it out now!Amey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameysahasrabuddheFor any feedback or requests on our Podcast, reach us onTwitter: @pm_journeyemail: productmanagement0100@gmail.comwebsite: https://unthinking.org/podcasts/product-management/

This week in Indian Startup News, Ex-unicorn Rivigo looking for Buyers at discounted price, Dezerv raises funding, Unacademy's Relevel shuffles 100 employees internally, ONDC to open for public from September. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 Ex-unicorn Rivigo looking for Buyers at discounted price 02:17 On the side 03:00 Bird's Eye Segment 04:33 Startup Spotlight 08:45 ShopX shuts down 09:40 Unacademy's Relevel shuffles 100 employees internally 11:03 ONDC to open for public from September Ex-unicorn Rivigo looking for Buyers at discounted price: Logistics Unicorn Rivigo is facing some tough times right now as the company is not being able to raise any funds and they are considering the only solution left to them - being acquired at a much less valuation. Rivigo's board has given green signal for this acquisition and according to an ET report, company is in early-stage talks with Flipkart's logistics arm eKart and FirstCry for acquisition. (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startups/troubled-logistics-tech-unicorn-rivigo-held-talks-with-flipkart-firstcry-for-a-sale/articleshow/93715606.cms) Funding this week: This week at least 12 Indian startups raised more than $281 Million. Fintech Sector - EarlySalary raised $97 Million Device Management Startup Servify raised $65 Mn F&B startups - Hector Beverages raised $50 Million Startup Spotlight: dezerv was founded in 2021 by co founders who have 50+ years of collective experience in managing over INR 50,000 Cr. It is the next big step in dezerv.'s mission of making expert-led investing available to professionals using its unique Integrated Portfolio Approach (IPA) which is built on decades of iinvesting expertise and modern portfolio science ShopX shuts down: ShopX, founded by Amit Sharma and Apoorva Jois in 2014, provided logistics and procurement support to kirana stores and other SME retailers. It offered assisted ecommerce solutions, including sourcing, supply chain and credit lines. It also provided digital services such as mobile and DTH recharge, bus and flight bookings, and utility bill payments. Unacademy's Relevel shuffles 100 employees internally: At least 100 of employees who were working on Relevel, have been asked to interview for other roles in Unacademy. Among these, 15-20 employees have declined this offer as they claim that the company was overburdening those retained at Relevel. ONDC to open for public from September: Currently ONDC is running on pilot in few Indian cities and right now ONDC officials are focusing on improving customer experience, building ONDC-compatible tools for small sellers and weeding out challenges within the network.

Cyberpolitik: The Internet of Yesterday and Tomorrow— Bharath ReddyThe foundation of the internet was built on three pillars:Reliance on the private sector, Light regulatory oversight, Free speech and a free flow of information. The hope was that these values would also be accepted as the internet would be accepted across the world. However this utopian vision is far from the reality of today’s internet. Gradually the internet has become less secure, more fragmented and less free. Authoritarian regimes across the world have been able to leverage control of the internet to shape narratives that strengthen their control. The US needs to recalibrate and adapt to this new reality. So begins the Council on Foreign Relations report titled “Confronting Reality in Cyberspace: Foreign Policy for a Fragmented Internet”. The authors propose a three-fold approach to confronting the new reality in cyberspace. Firstly, they recommend that allies need to come together to preserve a trusted and secure internet based on international standards. This includes working towards a shared policy on digital privacy, tackling cybercrime, and helping developing nations build cyber capacity. Secondly, there should be discussions and negotiations with adversaries to avoid cyber operations against nuclear command, control and communications systems, election systems and financial systems. This includes holding states accountable for cyber threats originating from their territory. The last recommendation involves getting the domestic house in order, which includes building cyber security talent, minimising domestic cyber security risks and prioritising digital interests in national security strategies.The predictions of the end of the global internet are growing quite common. The predictions for a fragmented internet range from a splinternet to a bifurcation between a Western and a Chinese internet. With these possibilities appearing more likely each day, India needs to rethink its own approaches to cyber security.Matsyanyaaya #1: Fission Factor: The Big Bet on Small Reactors— Aditya RamanathanWhile the world’s attention is drawn to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where Russian and Ukrainian forces are facing off, there are potentially more significant developments underway for the future of nuclear power. In July, the United States’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)  announced that it would certify the NuScale 50 MWe small modular reactor. NuScale’s reactor is only the seventh design which the NRC has ever approved in the history of nuclear power. It is also the first small modular reactor (SMR) that has received the green light in the United States. China is presently ahead of the US in SMRs. A couple of weeks before the NRC announcement, the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) began the construction of an SMR demonstration plant in Hainan Province. CNNC calls the project the first “commercial onshore small modular reactor” in the world. Once the 125 MWe reactor is up and running, CNNC claims it will be capable of powering 526,000 households. The SMR PromiseThe International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines SMRs as reactors with up to 300 MWe capacity. As the name indicates, SMRs are much smaller than traditional reactors and modular in their design. For instance, the NuScale design is touted as being only  “about 1 per cent the size of a traditional power plant’s containment chamber, though it delivers 10 percent of a plant’s power output.” SMRs are modular for two reasons. Firstly, assemblies and components can be pre-fabricated on a factory floor and then put together on site. Secondly, additional units to t can simply be added on site to increase capacity.Proponents of SMRs have advocated their widespread adoption for several reasons. For one, SMRs need much lower initial investments and fewer operators and specialists to run them. Two, unlike traditionally large nuclear plants, finding the right patch of real estate for an SMR is much simpler. Three, proponents say SMRs are well suited to serve small communities and provide a reliable base-load for renewables. Four, the modularity of SMRs allows them to be easily scaled up as the needs of a community grow. SMR proponents argue that these reactors are safer because they are far less susceptible to human error and rely on passive safety features. For instance, NuScale designs don’t require external power sources to operate the cooling systems for their cores. Finally, if an accident occurs, the consequences with an SMR are likely to be much less severe than in previous nuclear accidents. While both the CNNC and NuScale reactors feature novel designs, they nevertheless draw from proven technologies. CNNC describes its Linglong-1 design as being a pressurised water reactor, while the NuScale design is a light water reactor. Both reactors appear to use clever design and engineering to simplify traditional reactors. This is a sensible approach to getting SMRs approved and operational. However, other companies are experimenting with more radical designs. The Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) has designed what it calls a Micro Modular Reactor (MMR). The MMR eschews water altogether, using helium as a coolant and transferring heat through molten salt. MMRs also use a ‘Fully Ceramic Microencapsulated’ (FCM) fuel, in which small kernels of Uranium fuel, each about 1 mm across, are encased in layers of ceramic and silicon carbide. According to USNC, this makes the fuel much safer to use and transport, gives it greater temperature stability, and makes it impossible to repurpose for military purposes. In April, the company started running a pilot plant for the production of FCM fuel. USNC expects demonstration units of the reactor itself to be operational by 2026.  Besides these there are several other SMRs under development, including so-called micro-reactors from start-ups like Oklo and NuGen as well as designs from established giants like General Atomics. Finally, there are companies pursuing larger reactors like the so-called pebble-bed design as well as the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower’s molten salt design.Nuclear RealitiesFor all the promises of SMRs, it’s worth keeping in mind that they are still a long way off. Even if SMRs are all they claim to be, it may be another two decades before they dramatically impact the global energy mix. Until then, renewables and traditional nuclear plants will remain important sources of low-carbon energy. There also remain many uncertainties around SMRs, many of which feature completely unproven designs. As with every other means of power generation, there are also likely to be some downsides. For example, a Stanford-led study concluded that SMRs could produce much more nuclear waste than traditional reactors. The study looked at designs from NuScale, Terrestrial Energy, and Toshiba and concluded that these small reactors would experience greater neutron leakage, which would, in turn, create more radioactive material. While such studies are by no means conclusive, they highlight how little we will really know until prototype SMRs run for years. SMRs are also likely to be subject to the same political and social uncertainties that afflict traditional nuclear power. The supply of Uranium fuel remains highly politicised and dominated by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). And popular perceptions of nuclear power appear to be poor. Nuclear engineers may point out that the chances of a major radiation event at the Zaporizhzhia plant are very low, despite the ongoing fighting in its vicinity. However, popular perceptions are unlikely to make much allowance for expert opinion. Matsyanyaaya #2: How can the US-India iCET Succeed?— Arjun GargeyasI know we talk about the intersection of technology and international affairs in this newsletter. This time I’m trying something different, elucidating the possibility of a new technology in India which can become the global standard and shake things up in the international E-commerce arena if implemented perfectly.Over the last few weeks, we met with Mr Sanjay Jain, a member of iSPIRIT and an engineer closely working on developing the India Stack applications. This was to understand better the newly launched Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and how it functions. The ONDC was launched by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Government of India as an e-commerce aggregator. The primary objective was to challenge the monopoly of E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart while providing the local sellers a platform to be equally competitive. After having a couple of conversations with Mr Jain, who brilliantly explained the system’s backend, India had a sense of opportunity to set a global standard through which E-commerce operates. What is it?ONDC is a massive network that acts as a facilitator for buyers and sellers. It is not a platform such as Amazon. It is built on leveraging the network effects and positive externalities of E-commerce platforms, while aggregating all existing platforms to be on the same network. It is currently developed on the Beckn Protocol, an open-source software protocol. Now, for comparison's sake, it is similar to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which handles all UPI transactions. Why has it been introduced?One of the main reasons for introducing ONDC in India is the movement toward E-commerce while making it inclusive and accessible to the country’s large population. There is also the movement from platform-based to network-based technology in the E-commerce domain so that users are not locked into a particular platform only and can choose from multiple options. Including local merchants, sellers and buyers to make the network have over 15,000 retailers is another key objective of the platform itself. Increasing the share of Indians using E-Commerce (from 9 crores to 25 crores) and improving geographic coverage of E-Commerce (covering 75% of PIN codes) remains the core idea behind ONDC.How can it become the E-commerce domain standard?ONDC mainly revolves around two principles: Bundling and Interoperability. It helps separate the buyers and sellers while aggregating both on a single network. It addresses lock-in and unbundles E-commerce’s buying, selling and logistics aspects. Sellers need not register on an existing app but can come together with others to create seller apps with other retailers (location-specific retailer aggregation or delivery-specific services can have their platforms for end users to choose from). There’s no centralised payment processor, but seller-side apps determine the commission for whoever decides to get onboarded.Can India use ONDC and implement it in different countries just like its digital payments system? ONDC can soon be a perfect solution for preventing monopolies in the E-commerce domain. It can also provide local entrepreneurs with a perfect opportunity to reach the end users directly without being bullied by big firms who prefer to prop their own businesses.  The US has long been talking about breaking up Big Tech. Now, in the E-commerce space, ONDC has a shot (albeit a very long one currently) to become a credible alternative to the existing model (concentrated with a few giants who have captured the market) that other nation-states can use. With that, ONDC has the possibility of improving India’s own international reach (like UPI), thus helping the country gain some diplomatic heft in the E-commerce space. Our Reading Menu[Book] From Space to Sea : My ISRO Journey and Beyond by Abraham E. Muthunayagam.[Report] Green energy depends on critical minerals. Who controls the supply chains? by Luc Leruth, Adnan Mazarei, Pierre Régibeau and Luc Renneboog.[Article] Technology and the construction of oceanic space: Bathymetry and the Arctic continental shelf dispute by Daniel Lambach This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Shareholders of One97 Communications, which operates the fintech platform Paytm, voted almost unanimously for founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma's reappointment as managing director and CEO for another five years, at the company's annual general meeting last week. Nandan Nilekani's VC firm Fundamentum has raised $227 million for its second fund. And some Tesla drivers tested the ‘self-driving' feature on their own children. Notes: Shareholders of One97 Communications, which operates the fintech platform Paytm, voted almost unanimously for founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma's reappointment as managing director and CEO for another five years, at the company's annual general meeting last week. In a filing with the stock exchanges in Mumbai, Paytm reported that 99.67 percent of the shareholders voted in favour of the resolution. The matter of his pay faced only a little bit more resistance, but 94.48 percent of the shareholders still voted in favour. In the run-up to the AGM, which was held on Aug. 19, some proxy advisory firms opposed Sharma's reappointment and his pay. Institutional Investor Advisory Services India, one such firm, estimated Sharma's compensation at Rs. 796 crores for the current fiscal year, including stock options, according to a report in the Economic Times. Sharma has promised to get the loss-making company to break even by the end of the current fiscal year, but many remain sceptical. Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal have raised $227 million for the second fund at their VC firm Fundamentum Partnership, TechCrunch reported on Aug. 19. The fund plans to use the money to invest in four to five startups each year. Fundamentum, which typically backs startups in the Series B stage and beyond, will look to lead or co-lead $25 million to $40 million rounds, Aggarwal told TechCrunch in an interview. Nilekani is the co-founder of IT services giant Infosys and one of the central figures behind several of India's digital initiatives, including Aadhaar, UPI and ONDC. Aggarwal founded the BPO services provider Daksh which was acquired by IBM. The duo launched Fundamentum in 2019 to back consumer and software-focused startups, according to TechCrunch. YouTube has removed two videos from its platform which showed Tesla drivers conducting amateur vehicle safety tests using their own children in place of mannequins on the road or the driveway, CNBC reported on Aug. 19. The tests were to determine if a slow-moving Tesla equipped with the company's latest driver assistance systems would automatically avoid colliding with pedestrians — in this case, children — walking or standing still on the road, according to CNBC. CNBC points out that none of the driver assistance systems offered by Tesla today makes the car fully autonomous and that Tesla makes this clear as well in its manual. Tesla is being investigated in the US for multiple accidents, including some which involved fatalities, where the driver-assistance systems were said to be in use. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Welcome to #82nd episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. Today we have Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discussing -  1. Paytm holds first AGM since Going Public2. SBM Banks halts onboarding new customers for fintechs3. PhonePe announces e-commerce play with new ONDC app4. Indian restaurants look beyond Swiggy, Zomato for delivery...and more! ------------------------------------- Click here to get regular WhatsApp updates:https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 Hit the like button if enjoyed this roundup, and do not forget to share among your operator friends! Listen to our interviews and conversations with investors, operators, and founders on your favourite podcast platforms. #startups #unicorns  #technology #roundup #podcast #news #IPO #Layoffs #funding

This week in Indian Startup News, PRAVAIG announce their first EV, Ola launches Electric Car and S1 scooter, PhonePe building Grocery Delivery App, Cred's acquisition of Smallcase falls through. PRAVAIG announce their first EV: Pravaig Dynamics has officially announced their first production EV. Company has been developing this EV in stealth mode for sometime now however there is no fixed timeline on when this EV will hit the market. Ola launches Electric Car and S1 scooter: Ola has finally unveiled their Electric Car on the occasion of India's Independence day. This car will be available to buy in 2024 and according to CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal, they are building the capacity to produce 1 million of these cars every year. Ola has announced that they will be making three big production plants - one each for their scooters, four-wheelers and for making batteries. So these factories, according to Bhavish, will produce 1 Mn cars, 10 Mn two-wheelers and 100 GWh of cell capacity every year. Funding this week: This week at least 9 Indian startups raised more than $122 Million. Ecommerce Sector - Graas raised $40 Million Logistics startups - Shiprocket raised $33.5 Mn Creator-Economy startups - Phyllo raised $15 Million PhonePe building Grocery Delivery App: Fintech Platform PhonePe is working on a hyperlocal grocery delivery app, and it is building this app under the government's ONDC scheme. PhonePe's new grocery delivery app is currently in it's pilot stage, and they are doing it in Bengaluru currently. This app will be a separate app and not part of PhonePe's main app, as the company wants to differentiate it's payments and commerce offerings. Cred's acquisition of Smallcase falls through: Cred was in talks to acquire stock investment platform Smallcase for over 6 months now, and it seems now that this is not going to happen. Both parties couldn't agree to Smallcase's valuation. According to a report in ‘The Morning Context', Smallcase wanted a $500 Million valuation and Cred didn't agree to it and that's why these talks have fallen through.

India is home to 105 unicorns with a total valuation of $ 338.50 B; 19 of these were added to date in 2022. In contrast, France created one unicorn in the last 2 years. Despite this euphoria, we do not fully understand or appreciate the far-reaching impact of the tech industry on India's development march. Apart from being a $200B industry ($178B exports), tech changed the fabric of the nation: Diversity and inclusion - 5M direct employees, 1.8M of whom are women Transparency - first to adopt GAAP reporting; setting corporate governance standards Inclusive Growth - beyond 11 metros to tier 2, 3 and 4 towns Public Digital Infrastructure - Aadhaar, UPI, Co-Win, ONDC, Passport Seva, GST Harish Mehta, one of the band of mavericks who built this industry, joins us in this episode to give us some fantastic insights. Do record or write in with your feedback.

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) was launched with the support of the Indian government recently. It aims to break the monopoly of E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart in the market. In this episode, Arjun Gargeyas and Bharath Reddy talk to Mr. Sanjay Jain, a Fellow at iSPIRIT, on how exactly ONDC works and how it might evolve in the near future. Links mentioned in the episode:Build for Bharat PodcastYou can follow Sanjay Jain on twitter: https://twitter.com/snjyjnCheck out Takshashila's courses: https://school.takshashila.org.in/You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app.You can check out our website at https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/featuredDo follow IVM Podcasts on social media.We are @IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.https://twitter.com/IVMPodcastshttps://www.instagram.com/ivmpodcasts/?hl=enhttps://www.facebook.com/ivmpodcasts/Follow the show across platforms:Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon MusicDo share the word with you folks!

With this episode, we kick off a new theme - Everyday Tech and home automation is a natural choice for a first episode. The earliest reference to a smart home we found was a short story by Ray Bradbury in 1950 called “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It was about a smart house going about its daily routine in the year 2026. It wakes the family, cooks a perfect breakfast, cleans the tables, and so on. The story does have a morbid undertone - but more of that later. From fiction to nerdiness. Intended for residential networks only, UPnP is a set of networking protocols that allows devices to discover each other and work together without active manual configuration. Sounds a bit like the United Nations of networking

Roti, Kapda aur Makaan, The Three Musketeers, the 3 Little Pigs and 3 Idiots are just a few of the many good things that come in threes. And this phenomenon has been used to express some of history's most powerful ideas as well. “Veni, Vidi, Vici.” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) Julius Caesar. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.“ (“Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.”) The national motto of France. “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Swifter, higher, stronger”) The Olympic motto Aristotle observed that people find it easiest to remember three things. The rule of three started with his writing, “The Rhetoric;” In fact, the use of the rule of three is also referred to as rhetoric. The India Stack is also made up of three major components: Aadhar, UPI and ONDC (the focus of this episode).  Many of the world's most lasting jokes begin with three people walking into a bar (a priest, a reverend, and a rabbi or an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician).Given the popularity of the Rule of three, it should not come as any surprise that our podcast is called Three Techies Banter. We would love to hear back from you. Do record or write in to tell us what you think of the show.

This week in Indian Startup News, ONDC to break Swiggy and Zomato Monopoly, RBI's blow to e-wallet providers like Paytm, SuperLearn shuts shop, Leadsquared becomes unicorn, Layoffs Continue in Indian startups, 450 employees laid off this week. In Founder Spotlight, we have the founders of Mamaearth, Ghazal Alagh and Varun Alagh, who have announced plans to take Mamaearth public. In Funding news we have, Stashfin, Leadsquared, Leap and 18 other Indian startups raise more than $1 Million. ONDC to break Swiggy and Zomato Monopoly: A recent report has revealed that ONDC is working with a number of restaurants to end ‘monopolization' by Swiggy and Zomato. ONDC is doing this with the partnership of National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI), which is actually the main organization to represent the restaurant industry in India. This seems to be a welcoming step for restaurants. They were surely not happy with Swiggy and Zomato as they had to pay huge commissions, sometimes upto 25% of the order value, just to list on the platform. RBI's blow to e-wallet providers: RBI has announced that prepaid payment providers - mostly e-wallets like Paytm, Slice and Uni, won't be able to offer non-bank credit to customers. Currently, companies like Paytm and Slice provide you BNPL services by partnering up with NBFCs, which are not banks but an organization which is just providing some banking services. Founder Spotlight - Ghazal Alagh and Varun Alagh: Mamaearth was started when Ghazal and Varun were expecting their first child and they were looking for natural and safe products for the baby. Mamaearth was the first Asian company to receive MadeSafe certification. Company received huge word-of-mouth outreach, making them the fastest growing D2C brand in India. In May 2020, less than 4 years after starting up, it crossed the 100 Crores turnover mark. Funding this week: This week saw at least 14 Indian startups raising more than $763 Million. Fintech startups - Stashfin raised $270 Million SaaS startups - Leadsquared raised $153 Million E-commerce startups - Cashify raised $90 Mn Overseas Education - Leap raised $50 Million SuperLearn shuts shop: Bengaluru-based SuperLearn was started in 2020 by Kunal Bhatia and Ricky Gupta, when they realized that there are many skills like financial literacy, entrepreneurship and public speaking, which children are not taught in schools and so in December of the same year they started the company. After raising seed round of $300k, company wanted another round but investors weren't buying edtech story anymore and so they decided to shut down. Leadsquared becomes unicorn: Bengaluru-based SaaS startup, LeadSquared, became India's 103rd unicorn after closing its Series C round and raising $153 million from Westbridge Capital and Gaja Capital. The company was started by Nilesh Patel, Prashant Singh, Sudhakar Gorti, and Sukhbir Kalsi back in 2011, and it offers end-to-end sales and marketing solutions to over 2000 enterprises across various sectors. 450 startup employees laid off this week: ​​Social commerce platform Citymall which has laid off 191 employees. Unacademy owned Prepladder, which has laid off around 150 employees. Aquaculture startup Aqgromalin, which has laid off 30% of its workforce, or 80 full-time employees. Crypto Exchange Vauld, which has laid off 30% of its workforce, which is around 30 employees.

Apple is facing another claim of nearly a billion dollars, that it knowingly throttled the performance of older iPhones, this time in Britain. Telegram, a messaging app rival to WhatsApp, said it now had 700 million monthly active users and launched a premium subscription plan. And Khumbu glacier, on which Mt. Everest's base camp is located, is melting away at an alarming rate, BBC reports. Notes: Apple is facing another claim that it knowingly throttled the performance of older iPhones, this time in Britain. Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights champion in the UK, is taking Apple to court, seeking damages of around £768 million ($939 million) for up to 25 million iPhone users in the country, BBC reports. Gutmann's claim comes two years after a similar case was settled in the US. In 2020, Apple agreed to pay $113 million to settle allegations that it slowed down older iPhones. Thirty-three US states claimed that Apple had done this to push users into buying new devices. Telegram now has 700 million monthly active users, the company said in a blog post yesterday. The messaging app rose to prominence on the promise of privacy and security, especially after changes were announced last year by Meta's WhatsApp on how it will share user data. Telegram also announced a premium subscription that offers doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management and other ‘resource heavy' features, according to the blog post. All existing features will remain free. Telegram didn't provide details about the pricing of the subscription plan in the blog post, but the plan will likely cost about $5 a month, according to TechCrunch. India's open network for digital commerce, or ONDC, has partnered with the country's National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, or Nabard, to extend the reach of the ecommerce enabling the network to the agriculture sector, Economic Times reports. To begin with, ONDC and Nabard have announced a hackathon that has drawn 400 entries so far, including from several agri-tech startups, according to ET. Khumbu glacier, home to the Everest base camp in the Himalayas, is fast melting due to global warming and human activity, BBC reports. The melting is creating crevasses overnight, including in areas where people at the camp could be sleeping, and causing hazardous rock falls. The Nepalese government is now planning to shift the base camp to a different location at a lower altitude, according to the report. The current camp is at an altitude of 5,364 metres above sea level. The new one could be 200-400 metres lower, according to the report. Climate change and human activity is causing the glacier to lose 9.5 million cubic metres of water a year, researchers at Leeds University told BBC. In addition to global warming, human activity at the camp itself, which can have as many as 1,500 people during the March-May climbing season, is exacerbating the problem. These people generate 4,000 litres of urine a day and the fuel they use for cooking and staying warm also contributes to the melting, according to the report. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

In this video, we take a look at what ONDC promises and how this is going to impact D2C brands in India. ONCD is short for Open Network for Digital Commerce, it is an initiative by the government of India to promote an open network for exchange of goods and services over the Internet. This basically means that the government is trying to create a level playing field for all the small business owners in India. ONDC is promising same power and features to these small owners that big e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon have. Today if you want to sell products online, you just have two options; either to start your own website and sell it there or register on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart and sell it there. The issue with first option is, it requires knowledge of tech - to build a website, inventory management, hiring a delivery partner, payment partner etc. This is a big hassle. If you register on Amazon or Flipkart, you will have to pay hefty fees to them every time you sell something. This commission is generally in the range of 20-30%. Many people are still paying this commission because these platforms provide all these facilities to them, like storing their products, managing the inventory, delivery of the products, payment etc. But the issue with this is, this is limiting the growth of these small players. These Foreign brands have monopoly over Indian e-commerce and this is one of the important reasons for introducing ONDC. ONDC is trying to become UPI for India's commerce sector. ONDC could be a revolution for Indian D2C brands and it will solve two of the major problems D2C brands face in India. Keeping customer-acquisition-cost (CAC) low and efficient inventory management and customer experience, which includes order tracking, post order issues like return, replacement, grievances, or feedback that can make or break their trust in your brand. ONDC can be a game changer for these small businesses as now you won't have to pay anything to reach all these customers. All you have to do is list yourself with ONDC and customers across the country can find you from any application of their choice. The government has compared this with ‘hypertext transfer protocol for information exchange over the internet' where you could reach millions of customers without spending anything. Next big issue right now for D2C brands is efficient inventory management. ONDC promises to solve this by standardizing operations like cataloging, inventory management, order management and order fulfillment. This would mean that as a small seller, you could use any ONDC compatible application and you don't have to worry about managing everything on your own. There are many challenges with ONDC as well, which needs to be addressed. Firstly, data-privacy concerns. Now this is a concern involved with every of the government's massive projects; something we recently witnessed in the case of Aadhar, where the government itself warned people that their Aadhar data could be misused. In case of open commerce, the data could be even more sensitive in nature; your bank accounts, credit card number, addresses, if gone into wrong hands could pose a big threat. Next major challenge would be to maintain quality or the product. Currently, the quality control is the responsibility of these platforms like Amazon and Flipkart, wherein if you receive a fake product, you could return it and ask for replacement or even refund. In the case of ONDC, there has been no addressal of this issue; will there be inbuilt technology to deal with this or will these companies who plan to work with ONDC, make sure of the quality control.

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is an initiative aiming at promoting open networks for all aspects of exchange of goods and services over digital or electronic networks. ONDC is to be based on open-sourced methodology, using open specifications and open network protocols independent of any specific platform.  T Koshy is the CEO of ONDC where he focuses on building digital solutions to population scale problems. He also has a long background in the finances space, having worked in NSDL and EY for over 30 years. He is a graduate of IIM-B.  Nikhil Kumar is the Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Setu. Nikhil was earlier with the iSPIRT Foundation, where he worked on building a vibrant developer ecosystem for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN). Before starting up, Nikhil worked together with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani on the “India Stack" of Aadhaar and UPI. 

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is an initiative aiming at promoting open networks for all aspects of exchange of goods and services over digital or electronic networks. ONDC is to be based on open-sourced methodology, using open specifications and open network protocols independent of any specific platform. T Koshy is the CEO of ONDC where he focuses on building digital solutions to population scale problems. He also has a long background in the finances space, having worked in NSDL and EY for over 30 years. He is a graduate of IIM-B. Nikhil Kumar is the Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Setu. Nikhil was earlier with the iSPIRT Foundation, where he worked on building a vibrant developer ecosystem for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN). Before starting up, Nikhil worked together with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani on the “India Stack" of Aadhaar and UPI.

Broadcom has agreed to pay $61 billion for VMware, as the semiconductor giant looks to expand into cloud software for enterprises, making it the biggest tech deal this year after Microsoft's $68 billion deal to buy games maker Activision Blizzard in January. Facebook parent Meta is updating its privacy policies. And Google is exploring ways to join India's open network for digital commerce, Economic Times reports. Notes: Broadcom has agreed to pay $61 billion for VMware, as the semiconductor giant looks to expand into cloud software for enterprises. This will be the biggest tech deal this year after Microsoft's $68 billion deal to buy games maker Activision Blizzard in January. The 50:50 cash-and-stock deal is at a 44 percent premium to VMware's closing price on May 25, and the transaction is expected to close in Broadcom's fiscal year 2023, the company said in a press release. Facebook's parent Meta is updating its privacy policy, which willcome into effect from July 26, the company said in a blogpost yesterday. Users will be getting in-app notifications right away, though. These updates don't allow Meta to collect, use or share your data in new ways, Michel Protti, chief privacy officer, product at Meta, said in the blog post. The updates include more detailed explanations of Meta's privacy policy including how it uses and shares information with third parties. “And we've paired it with the Privacy Center and new controls to manage your experience, like who sees your posts and the topics you want to see ads about,” Protti writes. Google is in talks to find ways in which it could join India's Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports, citing sources familiar with the developments. This new network, ONDC, is being presented as a first-of-its-kind platform worldwide. It will make it easy for millions of small sellers in the country to go online and for consumers to find them irrespective of which app or site they use to shop. The network started with a pilot via Paytm's buyer app, and Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart unit may also be joining it, according to ET. In more Google news, the company is highlighting how its Chromebook laptops can work in ‘zero trust' corporate environments with its new Chrome Enterprise Connectors Framework, The Verge reports, citing a blog post from John Solomon, VP for Chrome OS at Google. The new integration system is designed to make the Chrome browser and Chrome OS devices easier for IT departments to implement with existing security, endpoint, and authentication solutions as well as other management tools. Solomon describes the new tools as a “plug and play” solution that lets other companies access Chrome OS management functions like remote-wiping a Chromebook using BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Management or flagging malware downloads with Splunk, according to The Verge. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

The government owned Open Network Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform is expected to transform the e-commerce landscape in India. It will enable consumers and sellers to engage and trade online regardless of the app they are using. How will this work? Will it enable local stores to compete with Amazon and Flipkart? Hosts Bhavya Dilipkumar and Surabhi Agarwal click into this new reality with T Koshy, CEO of ONDC and Sujith Nair, CEO and Co-Founder of Beckn Foundation.

Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart unit are joining the country's new Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports. The network is being compared with India's Unified Payments Interface, to support the idea that it could do for online commerce what UPI did for payments. And Uber, which is looking to cut costs in the US, is significantly and rapidly expanding its tech team in India. Notes: Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart unit are joining the country's new Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports, citing sources familiar with the developments. This new network, ONDC, is being presented as a first-of-its-kind platform worldwide that will make it easy for millions of small sellers in the country to go online and for consumers to find them irrespective of which app or site they use to shop. Paytm has already joined the network, and Flipkart's payments unit PhonePe is doing so as well, according to ET. Uber Technologies, which is cutting costs in the US, has announced a fresh round of recruitment for its India tech centres, with a plan to hire 500 more engineers by December. Uber recruited 250 engineers in 2021 to expand its tech team to 1,000 in two centres in India—Hyderabad and Bengaluru, the company said in a press release yesterday. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff recently that he will be cutting costs on multiple fronts, and that hiring should be seen as a ‘privilege,' CNBC reported on May 9. IBM's Red Hat, an open-source software leader, and Kyndryl, its IT infrastructure services subsidiary, have announced a strategic partnership to help customers embrace open, differentiated automation technologies and managed services to modernise core business applications and IT infrastructure, the company said in a press release. Red Hat and Kyndryl will offer integrated services and solutions based on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate critical workloads from the enterprise data centre to the edge and on public clouds. GoKwik, which helps brands reduce ecommerce churn, has raised $35 million in a Series B round led by Think Investments. The round also saw participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and RTP Global, the company said in a press release. The company will use the money to work on tech solutions for large marketplaces, and omnichannel players, and add more D2C customers. GoKwik expects to hire more than 200 people across India this year. ReshaMandi, which is building a ‘digital ecosystem' for the natural fibre supply chain in India, has made a foray into the skincare segment by investing an undisclosed amount in a Bengaluru-based skincare brand, Healios Wound Solutions, the company said in a press release. The investment will help Healios expand its silk protein-based skincare range and market it to a wider audience looking for natural, sustainable and environment-friendly skincare products. Sericin has antioxidant, anti-ageing, moisture retention, and depigmentation properties, which makes it an ideal ingredient in any skincare line, according to ReshaMandi's press release. Going forward, Healios's SeriSkin range will be positioned as a silk protein-based premium product made of naturally-extracted sericin, the company said. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds

Chirag Taneja is the co-founder and CEO of GoKwik, a startup that enables e-commerce companies and merchants to convert more. In this episode he spoke about the non-Amazon/Flipkart wave in the ecosystem, the e-commerce enablement catergory, prioritizing product roadmaps and more in his conversation with Roshan Cariappa.  Topics:  00:00 Introduction 01:18 Evolution of Ecommerce in India 04:31 The non-Amazon/Flipkart wave 06:49 The upcoming ONDC revolution 08:12 The Ecommerce enablement category 11:40 Unique insight that led to GoKwik's founding 15:02 Process of customer validation 17:53 What is GoKwik? 21:16 Prioritizing product roadmap  24:31 How does acquisition work for GoKwik? 27:08 High level challenges Chirag is solving 30:56 Scaling people from 0-1 to 1-10 journey 33:51 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in the ecommerce space 37:33 Books and Podcast Recommendations ------------------------------------- Click here to get regular WhatsApp updates: https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 ------------------------------------- Connect with Chirag : Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragtaneja/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tchirag ------------------------------------- Connect with Us:  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator ​Twitter: https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup​​ ------------------------------------- If you liked this episode, let us know by hitting the like button and share with your friends and family. Please also remember to subscribe to our channel and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/startup-operator/message

In today's episode for 2nd May 2022, we talk about the most requested topic in a long while now - ONDC. We've launched a new endeavor to give simplified health and life insurance advice via Ditto Insurance. Book a free consultation call with our advisors or just drop us a text on WhatsApp for all your insurance queries. Check out Ditto: https://bit.ly/3CLTfsc Insta- https://www.instagram.com/joinditto/ Twitter- https://twitter.com/joinditto

The government-backed open network for digital commerce or ONDC was launched last week in select cities. Mentored by Nandan Nilekani, ONDC is a not-for-profit system which the government believes will be a game-changer -- just like what UPI was for digital payment. From small kirana stores to leading FMCG players, all will get equal exposure to consumers on this platform. But will it emerge as a challenger to two multinational giants who, in the government's own words, have been giving preferential treatment to a bunch of players in India? And will it really benefit small sellers and the public at large?  The country took yet another leap towards self-reliance last week when an aircraft made a successful landing using the indigenous navigation system called GAGAN. With this, India became the first country in the Asia Pacific Region to achieve this feat. So what exactly is GPS-aided geo-augmented navigation or GAGAN and how will it help aircraft land safely in rough weather and in poor visibility? And how will it help India expand air connectivity to far-flung areas?  Let us turn to the markets now. Geopolitical tensions, rising inflation, skewing margin of India Inc and slow growth are casting a shadow over Dalal Street. While April saw equity markets reverse losses from March lows, bears returned to Street in the latter half. Will May see investors following the adage of ‘sell in May and go away'?  May is also the month when the heat wave is most brutal in northern India. The weatherman has now said that mercury will soar further this week and cautioned people against stepping out in the afternoon. But what exactly is a heat wave? Let us find out in this episode of the podcast.  Watch video

According to Arvind Gupta, the head of Digital India Foundation, a public platform is something that is built around the concept of openness, standard and trust. It is backed by the government and not by any private entity. There are about nine platforms with billion plus users each across the world. Five of them are in the US and four in China. And none of them are government backed. With Aadhaar, India built the world's first and largest public digital platform. It is now being used in banking, KYC and several other fields. It led to some sort of digital revolution, like the birth of UPI which ended the duopoly of two international operators in India. It allows you to send or receive money irrespective of the payment platforms on which you are registered. And now, Nandan Nilekani -- who helped the government create the biometric identification for almost 1.4 billion people after co-founding Infosys -- believes that Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC meets all the criteria for the next revolution and disruption in India. It has the government's commitment, the market condition is rife and there is a massive shift to e-commerce after the pandemic. ONDC seeks to level the playing field for small merchants in the country's fragmented but fast-growing $1 trillion retail market. While addressing a conference, Nilekani recently said that ONDC is very similar to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) -- which is also a non-profit section 8 company. Giving some details, Nilekani said that ONDC will put in place the ground rules, the network participation rules, the obligation and dispute resolution. It will have set of top class protocols to govern the online trade. It will lead the country towards transaction-led internet from the western model of advertisement-led internet. The small-scale implementation of ONDC kicked off on Friday last week. This pilot is being conducted across Delhi, Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Bhopal and Shillong. It will be later launched in 100 cities over a period of six months. ONDC will set protocols in critical areas like price discovery, vendor match, and cataloguing, ostensibly in open source. So, you ideally get an open network with open specifications and protocols. Clearly, there's a lot of stress on the ‘open' part. Although, not everyone agrees on calling ONDC a public good either. All of this is in the service of one goal -- to change the e-commerce market's fundamental structure by moving from the current platform-centric model to an open-network model. For instance, leather jacket seller Karan is only registered on Amazon. Meanwhile, Arjun, a prospective buyer who has heard of Karan's quality jackets, is registered on Flipkart alone. Arjun will first look for Karan on Flipkart. After failing to find him there, Arjun will have to register for an Amazon account. However, once ONDC is implemented, Arjun can directly purchase Karan's leather jackets without registering on Amazon.       Why is this such a big deal, though? There's no prohibition on Karan also registering as a Flipkart seller. Meanwhile, buyers shop across platforms as a matter of routine. With an account only on one e-commerce site, Arjun is probably an outlier.     Clearly, the real benefit would come in the form of future offerings that could be built on top of this platform-agnostic approach.     Once ONDC gets implemented, all e-commerce companies and online businesses in India will have to operate using the same processes and standards, as in the case of android-based mobile devices from different brands. According to reports, this could mean a complete revamp of systems for e-commerce players. They could end up losing control over their user interface, and, even more importantly, consumer behaviour insights. Basically, their competitive advantages. All of this amounts to a far-reaching and difficult reconfiguration. ONDC's may also erode Amazon and Wa

Welcome to #67 episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. Today we have Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discussing -  Topics 1. Govt. asks EV Makers to halt launch of new models 2. India launches pilot phase of UPI-type protocol ONDC in 5 cities 3. Flipkart opens up logistics arm for other ecomm players 4. Swiggy launches career accelerator programme for delivery executives 5. Turtlemint raises $120M Click here to get regular updates on WhatsApp: https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 Hit the like button if enjoyed this roundup, and do not forget to share among your operator friends!  Listen to our interviews and conversations with investors, operators, and founders on your favourite podcast platforms. #startups #unicorns  #technology #roundup #podcast #news --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/startup-operator/message

It looks like WhatsApp is experiencing FOMO. The instant messaging app now wants to take over the payment services sector in India. In its latest move, WhatsApp has introduced cashbacks. In other news, Farheen Khan discusses about ONDC and what are the plans going forward. This is the Indian government's initiative to democratise the e-commerce industry. To shed some light on this, we are joined by Beckn Foundation's co-founder and CEO - Sujith Nair. Tune in to find out some industry insights!

Welcome to #65 episode of The Startup Operator Roundup. Today we have Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discussing - 1. Tata Group officially launches super app Tata Neu 2. Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), is all set to launch its beta version in April. 3. Zomato, Swiggy to face CCI probe for alleged unfair business practices 4. Unacademy lays off 600 employees amid cost-cutting exercise and more! Click here to get regular updates on WhatsApp: https://wa.me/message/ZUZQQGKCZTADL1 Hit the like button if enjoyed this roundup, and do not forget to share among your operator friends! Listen to our interviews and conversations with investors, operators, and founders on your favourite podcast platforms. #startups #unicorns #technology #roundup #podcast #news --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/startup-operator/message

Today, someone having a Google Pay account can send money to another person who uses PhonePe, because both are using the common Unified Payments Interface or UPI platform. The government is planning a similar experiment in the e-commerce space, which is currently dominated by Amazon and Flipkart. Open Network for Digital Ecommerce, or ONDC, promises to provide a playing field to small merchants too.     Its proponents say that ONDC will move Indian ecommerce away from the current platform-centric model, dominated by market leaders Amazon and Flipkart, to an open network. It will do so by making several operational aspects like onboarding of sellers, vendor discovery, price discovery and product cataloguing open source. That will allow more and more traditional retailers to benefit from selling their wares online and compete with large e-commerce firms. It is envisaged that ONDC will eventually cover everything from clothes to food delivery to mobility. From what we know so far, the ONDC will mean the creation of a separate digital platform with easier processes for onboarding sellers. So, if a buyer is looking for, say, a white shirt, they will find the products hosted on Amazon and Flipkart. And they will also find the white shirt being sold by local shops in their neighbourhood.  ONDC is expected to give a leg-up to offline retailers, helping them compete with online sellers, thus boosting hyperlocal deliveries. For sellers, ONDC will mean their products becoming visible on multiple e-commerce websites without them having to register on each platform separately. As Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee pointed out, drawing parallels between ONDC and UPI or Email may be a little simplistic. This is because there are too many things that need to be checked in ecommerce to ensure a good experience for the customer. Did the consumer get the product they paid for? Did it arrive in one piece? Was the product genuine or fake? And so on. For this, ecommerce platforms invest huge money in their platforms, develop proprietary technologies that prioritise sellers who can fulfil orders in the most efficient way. Buyers routinely shop from across the platforms. And sellers list their products across various e-commerce sites too. In fact, most ecommerce sellers are simultaneously trading through multiple platforms, including Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. So it is yet to be seen if the government is able to come up with a platform which works seamlessly and offers alternatives to consumers and sellers. Watch Video

The government is set to have a busy winter session at the Parliament with a number of important Bills coming up for discussion. While the cryptocurrency Bill has hogged the limelight after the session's legislative agenda was released on Tuesday, some key Bills including the one on privatization of two public sector banks have gone under the radar.    Apart from preparing the Bills and tabling them in the Parliament, there are some other key reforms which are keeping the government busy. Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC is one of them. Through this, the government plans to democratize ecommerce and end what it says monopolistic practices in India.    Coming to the petroleum industry, the United States will release millions of barrels of oil from strategic reserves in coordination with China, India, South Korea, Japan and Britain, to try to cool prices. This comes after OPEC+ producers repeatedly ignored calls for more crude. India, on its part, plans to release about five million barrels of crude oil. But will this be a sufficient quantity of oil to control prices? How are market analysts reading into the joint effort which comes ahead of OPEC+ meet? While global crude oil prices are likely to remain volatile in the near future, India is seeking to reduce its dependence on crude oil. A step in the direction is building hydrogen-fuel capacities. State-owned Indian Oil Corporation floated a global tender recently to set up green hydrogen generation plants at two of its refineries. It came just days after PM Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit that the country will bring down its emissions to zero by 2070. Experts say that green hydrogen's enhanced use will help India meet its clean energy goals. But they also point out the high cost of green hydrogen. So, what does India need to do here? Find the answer and more in this podcast Watch Video

Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC is the Indian government's alternative to the American “laissez-faire, completely market-driven model”. It aims to be seller-first and consumer-focussed and to shift power away from the e-commerce giants. But many stakeholders bring many problems and if not solved, the network might end up creating many more.   Story originally reported by Arundhati Ramanathan. Want to dive deeper into this story? Access it for free: https://the-ken.com/podcastoffer/   Hosts: Anushka Chhikara and Olina Banerji.   Music and editing by Sameer Rahat of Baqsa Studios.   Psst share your feedback with us on podcast@the-ken.com