The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) have stepped up efforts to digitise India’s vast kirana retail network through DigiDukaan, an initiative aimed at modernising procurement and supply-chain operations for more than 1.4 crore neighbourhood stores across the country.
The initiative was discussed at the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Roundtable – Bharat Commerce Chintan Shivir held in New Delhi on Friday, bringing together leading FMCG companies, distributors, technology providers and logistics partners to explore ways to accelerate the digital transformation of India’s general trade ecosystem.
According to the Commerce Ministry, kirana stores account for nearly 75-80 per cent of FMCG sales in India.
However, a large part of the sector continues to rely on fragmented ordering systems, manual sales processes and limited inventory visibility, leading to inefficiencies across the supply chain.
DigiDukaan has been designed as a business-to-business procurement platform that enables retailers to place orders digitally while gaining better visibility into schemes, inventory availability and working capital management.
The platform also aims to help distributors expand market reach without increasing field-force costs and provide brands with direct access to retailer demand signals.
The programme has already been rolled out in Hyderabad, where more than 10,000 retailers and over 35 brands have been onboarded through Qwipo.
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Following the Hyderabad deployment, DigiDukaan is scheduled to launch in Jaipur on 19 June through Salescode, with further expansion planned across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR in the coming months.
During the roundtable, industry participants discussed key challenges affecting general trade, including fragmented retailer engagement, rising sales-force costs, inventory inefficiencies, limited visibility into secondary sales and increasing competition from digital-first retail models.
Stakeholders also examined how open digital infrastructure could improve retailer access, distributor productivity, demand planning and the effectiveness of promotional schemes.
The meeting also served as a platform for industry representatives to provide recommendations on distributor digitisation, catalogue standardisation, retailer onboarding and technology integration.
Companies were invited to collaborate as founding partners in the next phase of DigiDukaan’s expansion.
The roundtable was chaired by DPIIT Additional Secretary Ateesh Kumar Singh and attended by representatives from major consumer goods companies, including HUL, ITC, Coca-Cola, Tata Consumer Products, CavinKare, Marico, Bikano, L’Oréal, Moon Beverages, Anmol Industries, Nestlé and Kirana King.
Participating organisations expressed interest in supporting the initiative as it expands to additional markets.
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