Namma Yatri — How open source is building inclusion, fairness in India

Creations such as Namma Yatri showcase potential of open protocols to serve as a democratic alternative, but questions arise about their sustainability.

Young Indians are all too familiar with the phrase ‘there’s an app for that.’ Mobile platforms such as Dunzo, Swiggy, Zomato, Meesho, and GooglePay are popularly trusted to unite the various needs and comforts of a consumer: high convenience, less cost and time spent, and greater satisfaction of choices.

One sees the growing participation of Indians in a digital economy that replaces traditional practices of buying, selling and decision-making with online platforms and ecommerce applications. However, platforms and applications themselves are being outgrown for more ambitious digital projects, as some Indian cities are experiencing the benefits of the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an emerging digital public infrastructure that brings all sellers and buyers into a digital ecosystem of items and services.

Developers and the Government of India predict ONDC to disrupt the face of ecommerce in the same way UPI (used by roughly 20 per cent of India) revolutionised payment mechanisms, propelling visions of inclusion and equitable growth.

The unique selling points around both UPI and ONDC are their promise to ‘democratise’ India’s relationships of transaction. The important question for us as consumers is to then ask how this promise is achieved: what is ‘democratic’ about digital public infrastructures? How are they built and who do they serve? Importantly, in a socio-economically diverse democracy, who can they serve?

ONDC owes its technological foundations to the ubiquitous Beckn protocol — a set of open-source specifications that enable large-scale interoperability across multiple platforms on a single network. For instance, consumers can now access multiple platform offerings on a single shopping cart, and not be limited to either Amazon or Zomato during a single transaction.

For sellers, this will significantly reduce upfront costs in setting up online marketplaces as they do not need to build their own search engine, delivery chain, digital payments portal, and website as these can be picked and put together like lego blocks upon integrating onto the network.

By remaining ‘open’ for integration, the Beckn protocol brings us back to the concept of enhancing community value through collaboration. Open digital tools promote the essence of building together, and this can be (and has been) leveraged for large-scale governance benefits. Now, private sector businesses can build digital platforms for specific use cases at low cost over an underlying singular digital infrastructure, empowering users and local businesses to interact with each other without being restricted to a single platform or service provider.

A notable example using Beckn’s open mobility protocol is Namma Yatri, a new ride-hailing app launched in Bengaluru by the Auto Rickshaw Drivers’ Union (ARDU) in collaboration with Soft Bank-backed startup, Juspay Technologies. The thrust of the application is its business model which is designed to please both drivers and riders: zero commissions, zero cancellation charges, and zero surge pricing.

By building over an open protocol, Juspay has eliminated the need for a central profit-making intermediary to connect drivers and riders. As a result, drivers receive cash in hand or directly into their accounts without any delays or reductions. The application thus replaces the commission-based arrangements of private aggregators to restore earning power to auto drivers. Today, Namma Yatri has recorded over 3 million rides, after hitting the 1-million mark only in April.

Namma Yatri drivers are incentivised to operate on a platform that allows them to maximise their earnings without submitting to platforms that provide drivers with limited negotiating power. But the wins are more than purely financial — by centring an economically-vulnerable occupational category of auto drivers, whose earnings are either disproportionately diluted by aggregators or dependent on daily bargaining with commuters, the application has proved that innovation can and must be conscious in its representation of society’s needs.

Namma Yatri reflects the effort of stakeholders to expand the right to participate in a digital economy and disrupt existing digital labour practices. It provides optimism for digitally-vulnerable groups and encourages local communities to leverage an open protocol for building context-sensitive technologies that can empower local communities and break free of inequitable platform-worker-consumer relationships.

Creations such as Namma Yatri showcase the potential of open protocols to serve as a democratic alternative to the platform model, but questions arise about their long-term sustainability. Considering the application incurs daily costs for R&D, cloud services, engineering, marketing, and using APIs like Google Maps, Juspay may introduce a subscription fee for auto drivers actively using the platform.

Financial support from Softbank and the Nandan Nilekani-led non-profit, Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (FIDE), has helped Juspay manage the operational expenses for Namma Yatri, but such a model would not be conducive for marginalised communities looking to participate in an open network by deploying localised, tailor-made solutions to suit their needs. Without supportive open-source communities that can assist in scaling a solution, digital service delivery on ONDC will be controlled by dominant players in the online ecosystem.

To truly empower service providers and users in an open digital ecosystem, there needs to be easy access to funding, and avenues for collaboration on product, supported by strong regulatory mechanisms and grievance redressal processes. A failure to accommodate these would put ONDC at risk of falling into the same trap it was attempting to eliminate by initiating the platform-to-protocol transition.

(Ava Haidar is Research Associate, and Rohan Pai is Research Analyst, Aapti Institute — a Bengaluru-based think-tank working on themes at the intersection of technology and society.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.