ONDC — A Surgical Strike?
Sometimes, all out war is simply not an option.
It might be required, but the fallout, and collateral damage linked to it could simply cause more misery than what we can afford (or care to afford).
It’s also noteworthy to mention, that historically, most of the warfare has been to the end of ensuring monetary gain. Whoever controls trade, resources and markets, is the most powerful. Unsurprisingly, much disruption and unrest across the world can be attributed to various entities fighting for supremacy therein.
However we are well into the 21st century and brute tactics to ensure ownership of revenue streams is not practical.
Especially so, if the entities seen exhibiting adversarial behaviour are operating within legal bounds specified.
What am I rambling on about?
E-commerce in India.
The ever expanding e-commerce sector in our country has brought about a revolution in consumption and changed the shopping habits of (mostly urban) India. More and more people are buying online and the trend does not seem like stopping anytime soon.
But there are a few (rather big) problems:
- The retail e-commerce space has become a duopoly
- The biggest player (by far) is a foreign owned brand
- There have been multiple instances of anti-competitive behaviour
- Customer data has been used by platforms for forward and backward moves in the supply chain
- The platform percentage fees have been termed exorbitant by sellers
- Deep discounting based on funding has led to price imbalances with brick and mortar retail
- Preferred sellers getting more visibility and traction squeezes out smaller sellers
- Reducing product quality and sourcing (from adversarial nations) has been an issue
- Consumer data is owned by private entities
So, all in all, expected problems in a capitalistic economy. But problems nonetheless.
Now in a non-liberalised 1980s India, the government could simply have decided that they’ve had enough and thrown the companies causing such a headache out of the country. Seems a simple enough solution right?
Unfortunately in 2022… nowhere close.
See, you can’t just throw a legitimately operating set of companies out of a country without damaging your reputation (who else would want to invest in your nation if they could one day be thrown out willy-nilly). You’d also open yourself to litigation, plus jeopardise your memberships in trade organisations. And then there’s always the issue of trade relations with the countries these businesses are headquartered in.
Oh, and then there are the thousands of jobs that would be lost… etc etc.
So yeah, the government can’t step in with a sledgehammer of a ban (although we all know how alluring that move is).
There always is the option of creating far and wide ranging regulations. Although such moves can only have limited effect in face of loopholes and customer preferences.
So the Government of India has decided to get into the game.
As they say, if you can’t beat em…
