National Cooperative Union of India organized the 17th Indian Cooperative Congress (ICC), the highest forum of the Indian Cooperative Movement on 1-2 July, 2023 at International Exhibition-cum-Convention Centre (IECC), Pragati Maidan, New Delhi which also coincides with International Cooperative Day. In the inaugural session of the event, honorable Prime Minister of India Shri. Narendra Modi launched an e-commerce application exclusively for the Cooperatives.
NCUI is an apex organization of Cooperative movement in India which is responsible for education and training of more than 8.5 lakh Cooperatives in India with a total membership of more than 30 crore people. NCUI was looking for a scalable platform like Google Cloud to host this e-commerce application for its users. The e-commerce platform was built on Google Cloud and will provide a scalable, easy to use and robust technology for economic empowerment of the Cooperatives and their members by providing easy access to currently inaccessible buyers.
The platform will help the Cooperatives to sell their products across geographies without any intermediaries. The platform will also provide complete training and capacity building support to the Cooperatives for onboarding on the portal and in areas of packaging, branding and accessing the welfare schemes of the government.
The e-commerce application will offer an extensive platform to the vast community of Cooperatives enabling them to sell their products and services to a larger group of people including their Cooperative members. This partnership will promote economic growth, development and a common platform for all the small Cooperatives to compete in the market of big players. Furthermore, it will also enable consumers to choose the right product under their preferred price segment.
Dr. Sudhir Mahajan, Chief Executive, NCUI said, “Powered by robust and scalable technology, the launch of the E-commerce application will enable Cooperatives and their members an easy access to buy and sell their products to buyers across the country. We are positive our partnership with Google Cloud will enable us on our digital transformation journey and economically empower the Cooperatives.”
Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India said, “NCUI were seeking a cloud partner who could offer scalability, open-source technology, and a collaborative approach to enhance their operations. We are confident that our cloud platform will provide a seamless experience for their users. We strongly believe that our partnership will provide NCUI with powerful technology solutions, which will help in the economic growth and empowerment of both the Cooperatives and their members.”
As the number of users and their demands will likely increase with time, NCUI chose to work with Google Cloud to leverage its scalable, open source, easy to use and open standard cloud platform. Vina Tech Solutions (Google Cloud partner) worked with NCUI to design and develop the application on Google Cloud platform. . NCUI and Google Cloud aim to expand this pilot project to other geographies soon.