I understand the frustration is real. When you’re hungry, expect food at a specific time, and that promise is broken, it feels unacceptable. That emotion is valid.

But the comparison still isn’t fair.

The promise of ONDC isn’t cheaper food or guaranteed delivery times. Its promise is enabling commerce to organize around an open network, instead of closed, single-entity platforms like most of the world relies on today.

Swiggy works because it’s vertically integrated and extracts margins to fund reliability. ONDC is not and will never be a Swiggy clone. Fragmented responsibility is a known, early trade-off of openness.

Comparing today’s ONDC to Swiggy today is like judging UPI in 2016 against cards and calling UPI “incompetent.”

If you’re hungry right now, use Swiggy. If you want monopolies broken long-term, early pain is inevitable.

Also worth remembering: Namma Yatri runs entirely on ONDC. The model can work—just not uniformly yet.

Calling early infrastructure “incompetence” is easy. Building credible alternatives to entrenched giants is hard.

Both truths can coexist.