AT THE AGE OF 37, Subathraa Vasan left her job as CEO and Vice Principal of Emerald Heights College for Women, Ooty, in mid-2015, to pursue her long-term dream of becoming an entrepreneur. An M. Tech graduate, her interest was in food products made of millets. But having taught image processing for over 15 years, it was a steep learning curve for Vasan to switch from teaching to start selling value-added, millet-based products. “It was an amazing job [of teaching], but still, my mind was in search of an opportunity to get into entrepreneurship. I had a keen interest in food. But food was not my domain of learning, so I spent nearly a year on R&D before jumping in,” says Vasan.
She launched her venture—PVR Foods—in October 2016 with a variety of ready-to-cook food products. Her company started seeing scale after an initial period of hiccups. From there, a natural progression for her budding enterprise was to log on to the digital world of business, but there, the novice entrepreneur was in for a rude awakening. “When I went to the marketplaces, they wanted 40 per cent commission, and I couldn’t offer that sort of margins. They were asking me to increase the price and then give them 40 per cent. I couldn’t go online because of the pricing. When the open network for digital commerce (ONDC) came, I jumped on to it, because here, I am able to sell products for the same price as in physical stores. I can still earn a profit and my customers are happy,” she says.
But it is not just lower commissions that is driving merchants to join ONDC. Take the case of
