Reliance's Entry To Digitise Five Million Kirana Stores By 2023

India’s largest corporate conglomerate, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), has made a strong entry into the online retailing sector by creating India’s biggest offline to online (O2O) platform.

- Vivek Gupta

While certain Indian tech start-ups have been trying to digitise India’s largely unorganised kirana stores, the entry of Reliance will revolutionise the sector. According to a report by Merill Lynch released on May 7, 2019 there were only 15,000 digitised kirana stores in the country. With Reliance’s role, this figure will shoot up to five million by 2023.

Stock-taking

As per the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM)'s ‘Strategic Review 2018’ on the Indian Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) sector, the e-commerce market was placed at $33 billion in 2017-18, and reached $ 38.5 billion in the financial year 2018-19, growing at a rate of about 17%.