ONDC sells 10,000 kilos of Tomato in Delhi, Surpasses 1.1 million Retail Orders

New Delhi, 31st July 2023: ONDC chief T Koshy has stated that, six days after offering tomatoes for ₹70 per kg, ONDC claims to have enabled procurement of 10,000 kilos of the produce in the national capital. Furthermore, the network has completed 1.1 million retail orders and 5.4 million mobility transactions since its beginning last year.

In a conversation with MoneyControl Koshy said, “Last week, we had an allocation of 2,000 kg of tomato every day (1,000 orders) in Delhi from the National Cooperative Consumer Federation (NCCF), which was getting sold out by afternoon.”

Following a directive from the Centre, NCCF and NAFED began selling tomatoes at ₹70 per kg earlier this month, after prices in several parts of the country surged and reached ₹140

Since then, the two organisations have been collecting tomatoes from ‘mandis’ in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra and making them available at reasonable prices in major consuming areas including as Delhi-NCR, Bihar, Rajasthan, and others.

Koshy further elaborated on the retail of tomatoes on ONDC and said, “The plan is to run the initiative on ONDC for at least one more week. The tomato orders will continue to be delivered with zero delivery fees. However, we have restricted the number of orders per user to one each week. We want the maximum number of people to try out ONDC through this initiative.”

The ONDC CEO also stated that the network’s average number of daily orders has been continuously increasing as more sellers join the network. For example, a farmer producer organisation selling honey on ONDC has already received ₹1 lakh in orders.

According to sources, ONDC reached a new daily retail order top of 35,000 on July 9, while Delhi-NCR outpaced Bengaluru in terms of order volume. While the Delhi-NCR region accounted for about 11,000 orders on July 30, Bengaluru contributed over 7,000 orders to the total.

The following three cities in terms of order volume were Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune, each with 2,500-3,000 orders. Food and grocery orders are included in retail orders, with the former accounting for the vast majority of orders on the government-backed interoperable network.

ONDC, which is backed by the government, aims to prevent a few giant platforms, such as Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, and Zomato, from dominating the e-commerce and food delivery sectors.