Picture someone planning four days in Hampi. They book the train on one app, look for a homestay on a second, and compare hotels on a third. The monument tickets come from a government portal. A local guide is found through a friend's WhatsApp forward, and the auto-rickshaw is haggled for at the station. Each step is a separate search, a separate login and a separate payment, and none of these services knows the others exist.
Now picture the woman who runs a four-room homestay outside
Hampi. Travellers can find her if she pays a large commission to one of a
handful of platforms, or if she sits high enough in a search algorithm she has
no say over. Otherwise she depends on word of mouth. The tour guide, the
coracle operator on the Tungabhadra and the family that cooks a Karnataka thali
for visitors are in the same position. India's tourism economy is full of
people like them, and digitally most of them barely exist.
In late September, the Ministry of Tourism and ONDC launched
the National Digital Tourism Stack. It would be easy to file this under the
usual pattern of an MoU, a press release and a photo opportunity. That would be
a mistake. For the first time, a sector ministry has chosen the open network as
the operating architecture for its whole domain, rather than treating it
as one more channel to put on a slide. If the effort works, it will matter far
beyond travel.
The idea behind the rails
ONDC began in retail, with support from the Ministry of
Commerce. Retail was never the whole point, though. The idea was larger and
simpler: any product or service that can be described in a catalogue should be
listed on the network once and then be discoverable through many buyer-side
interfaces. Each of those interfaces would put together the selection that
suits its own users.
This turns the platform economy around. On a closed
platform, the seller goes to the platform, follows its rules, pays its fees and
serves its customers. On an open network, the seller publishes once and many
storefronts compete to bring that seller to their users. A farmer-producer
organisation, a neighbourhood kirana, a taxi driver or a homestay owner can
each be found by a grocery app, a fintech app, a travel app or a vernacular app
built for one district. The network handles discovery, trust and settlement.
Interfaces compete on curation and service, and nobody owns the customer
outright.
This is how UPI works, and it is why UPI won. No single bank
or app owns the payment, and every app can reach every account. ONDC is the
attempt to do for commerce what UPI did for money.
What retail taught us, uncomfortable parts included
It would be dishonest to write this piece without saying
what the first years showed. Early transaction volumes on ONDC retail were
driven largely by incentives and discounts. When those incentives were reduced,
volumes fell. Some read this as proof that the open network idea had failed.
That reading is wrong, but the lesson behind it is real and important.
Rails do not create demand. A highway with no reason to
travel on it stays empty. Network effects depend on enough sellers being
present that buyers find what they want, and on buyers having a reason to come
back. Subsidies can prime the pump, but a market cannot be bought into
existence. The parts of the network that have grown most steadily are the ones
where the open model solved a problem the incumbents were not solving. Mobility
is the clearest case. Driver-first ride-hailing on open rails, such as Namma
Yatri in Bengaluru, grew because drivers kept more of each fare and riders got
fair pricing. Farmer-producer organisations, MSMEs, and financial products such
as credit and insurance have since joined, one after another, and each is
gaining traction at its own pace.
The pattern is clear. ONDC as orchestrator can make
onboarding, discovery and transactions possible across very different goods and
services. Ecosystem participants have to drive the growth. Government's job is
catalytic: nudges, early interventions and convening power, used to start the
pump and then stepped back from.
Why tourism is the right next domain
Tourism may be the best fit yet for the open network model,
because tourism has always been a bundle.
A trip is not a single product. It is transport, a stay,
food, experiences, guides, tickets, local mobility, shopping and payments,
often across several states and languages and supplied by dozens of independent
providers, most of them small. Closed platforms deal with this in one of two
ways. Some take a narrow slice, such as flights or hotels, and leave the
traveller to assemble everything else. Others try to own the whole bundle, and
that pushes them towards a small number of large, standardised suppliers that
are easy to list and easy to charge.
An open network handles it differently. If the homestay, the
guide, the monument ticket, the local cab and the craft workshop are each
catalogued once on shared rails, any buyer-side app can assemble them into one
itinerary. A pilgrimage app, a backpacker app, a luxury concierge service and a
state tourism department's own app can draw on the same supply and present it
in different ways. The traveller plans, discovers and pays in one place. The
supplier is listed once and becomes visible everywhere.
Several of the pieces are already in place. Mobility is live
on the network. UPI handles payments. Ticketing, accommodation and experiences
are the categories NDTS now aims to connect. Interoperability across categories
is exactly what tourism has lacked, and it is exactly what an open network is
built to provide.
What the Ministry of Tourism got right
The most important decision the Ministry made was the one it
chose not to make. It did not build a government tourism app.
India has a long list of well-meant government apps that
were launched with fanfare and later quietly abandoned. They failed because a
ministry cannot match the product quality, marketing budgets and iteration
speed of private companies competing for users. A ministry can do
something no private company can: convene a whole sector around a neutral,
shared infrastructure that none of the participants would trust if a competitor
owned it.
That is the role the Ministry has taken. It is acting as
market-maker rather than market participant, building on ONDC's rails with
active industry involvement. The intent is to connect the scattered players in
experiences, travel, ticketing, homestays, hotels, mobility and payments, so
that the traveller gets one complete offer and the supplier gets a level field.
The Ministry has also seen what many policymakers still
miss. The value of DPI does not come from building rails for each sector
separately. It comes from reusing rails that already exist. Tourism did not
need its own protocol, its own payment system or its own registry framework. It
needed to connect to what was already built and add what was specific to
tourism. That is what makes the effort quick and inexpensive, and if it works,
easy to copy.
What could still go wrong
Launch is not adoption, and anyone who has worked on an open
network knows how wide that gap can be. Five risks need attention from the
start.
Catalogue quality. A homestay with blurred photos, an
unclear cancellation policy and no live availability will not be booked,
however open the network is. The hard part is onboarding millions of small
suppliers with catalogues good enough to compete. That needs state tourism
departments, industry associations and seller-side apps doing the unglamorous
work in each district.
Accountability across a bundle. If the homestay
cancels, the cab does not turn up and the guide is a stranger, who does the
traveller complain to? On a closed platform, one company takes the blame. On an
open network, grievance redressal has to work across several independent
parties. If that fails, travellers will go back to the platform they know, even
if it costs more.
Incumbent incentives. Large travel platforms have
built their margins on owning the customer relationship. Some will join the
network as buyer apps, and that should be welcomed. Others will keep their best
supply exclusive. The network grows only if joining is clearly better than
staying out.
Buyer-app economics. Someone has to make money
putting together and serving trips built from network supply. If the unit
economics do not work without subsidy, retail's history will repeat itself.
State participation. Tourism is administered largely
by the states. A national stack that state tourism departments do not actively
adopt, populate and promote will cover the map unevenly.
None of these is a reason for scepticism. They are a reason
to measure the right things. The test of NDTS is not how many announcements are
made or how many apps sign up. It is how many travellers come back to book a
second time, and what share of tourism spending reaches small suppliers who
were invisible before.
A template for every ministry
This is why the tourism initiative matters well beyond
tourism.
Each ministry oversees a domain made up of thousands of
fragmented suppliers and millions of underserved users. Each faces the same
choice the Ministry of Tourism faced: build its own portal and hope people use
it, or connect its domain to rails that already exist and act as steward and
catalyst.
Look at the range. In finance, credit, insurance and
investment products are already moving onto open rails. Spiritual and
pilgrimage travel is one of India's largest and least organised economies,
covering darshan bookings, prasad, pilgrim stays and local transport. Handloom
and fashion connect weavers in Varanasi and Pochampally to buyers they
cannot reach today. Skills and jobs could match training providers,
apprenticeships and employers in the same open way that commerce now matches
buyers and sellers. Healthcare, agriculture inputs, education and logistics all
have the same structure: many small suppliers, many users, and a middle layer
currently dominated by a few gatekeepers.
While some sectors have their own platorms and their own network. How do we make them all part of a larger interoperable network of transaction.
The protocol, the payment layer, the trust framework and the
dispute resolution design already exist. What each domain needs is a ministry
willing to do what Tourism has done: see the larger picture, bring its industry
to the table, and use its catalytic power to get the first few thousand
suppliers and the first few apps onto the network.
The real stakes
India built Aadhaar so that every resident could prove who
they are. It built UPI so that every resident could pay and be paid. Both
succeeded because they were open, interoperable and owned by no single company.
The next stage is commerce itself: the right of every seller to be found and
every buyer to choose, without having to go through someone else's gatekeeper.
That is what "democratising digital commerce"
means in practice. The homestay owner outside Hampi does not need a bigger
subsidy or another government app. She needs to list once and be visible to
every traveller using every app. The Ministry of Tourism has now laid the track
for her.
Whether other ministries follow will decide whether the open
network stays a set of promising pilots or becomes the way India trades. The
rails are already built, and the remaining question is which other ministries
will put their sectors on them.
"The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past." Tim Berners-Lee
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