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Work / Bharat-First / Setu

No. 04 · Bharat-First · Voice Commerce

नासिक से 500 किलो प्याज़ है, 25 रुपये में।

Five hundred kilos of onions from Nashik. Twenty-five rupees a kilo.

One sentence. One farmer. One national marketplace.

The illiterate farmer becomes the seller.

India's Open Network for Digital Commerce opened a national market for every shop in the country. But ONDC speaks JSON. Setu lets a farmer speak Hindi. In milliseconds, the sentence above becomes a Beckn 1.2 catalogue listing visible to every buyer on the network.

View source How it works
260MFarmers excluded by literacy
12+Indian languages and mixes
v1.2Beckn protocol compliance
0Forms. Typing. Reading.
1Tap to enter the market

Act I · The Exclusion

The market opened.
The seller could not read the door.

UPI moved a billion Indians onto digital payments. ONDC promises the same for digital commerce. But the catalogue is a JSON document, the listing flow is a form, and the dashboard is in English. Speech is the only interface a quarter-billion farmers actually share.

  1. 81%

    of India's farmer households are smallholders. Most never used a structured form online in their life.

  2. JSON

    Beckn protocol payloads carry strict typed catalogues. Forty fields per item. One typo and the listing is rejected.

  3. 8

    A farmer's sale today still moves through eight middlemen. Each takes a cut. None tells the farmer the real mandi rate.

  4. 0

    Apps that accept Hinglish, mixed dialect, ambient noise, and produce a Beckn-compliant catalogue. Until now.

Act II · The Translation

One sentence in.
A national catalogue out.

Watch the transformation. The farmer never sees a form. The buyer never sees the dialect. ONDC sees only valid Beckn 1.2.

Farmer · Nashik · Hinglish

नासिक से 500 किलो प्याज़ है, 25 रुपये में।

Gemini 3 Flash · within milliseconds

Commodity onion. Quantity 500 kilograms. Origin Nashik. Asking price twenty-five rupees per kilo.

Setu · Beckn v1.2.0 catalogue out 
"item": {
  "id": "setu-2026-onion-nsk-0500",
  "descriptor": { "name": "Onion · Nashik" },
  "quantity": { "available": { "count": 500, "unit": "kg" } },
  "price": { "currency": "INR", "value": "25.00" },
  "location_id": "loc-nashik-mh-422001"
}
Buyers on the ONDC network · seconds later

A retailer in Pune. A wholesaler in Hyderabad. A processor in Kolhapur. Quotes start arriving on the farmer's phone, in Hindi.

Act III · The Pipeline

Four moves.
One tap to start.

  1. Tap and speak

    One large button. The farmer presses, speaks naturally in their dialect, and releases. Whisper STT and Bhashini handle the long tail of Indian languages and code-mixed Hinglish, Tanglish, Banglish.

  2. Understand the intent

    Gemini 3 Flash extracts commodity, quantity, asking price, location and quality grade. Cross-checks against AgMarkNet's live mandi rate so the farmer never lists below market.

  3. Validate against the schema

    The structured intent is shaped into a Beckn v1.2.0 item, validated against the official ONDC catalogue schema. Reject early. Never broadcast a malformed payload.

  4. Broadcast to the network

    The listing goes out as a real Beckn search response. Every conformant buyer app on ONDC sees the catalogue. Quotes return. The farmer hears them, in their language, on the same call.

Act IV · The Stack

Government infra plus one bridge.

The marketplace already exists. The protocol already exists. The data already exists. Setu is the bridge from a sentence to a SKU.

  • Next.js 15 · App Router
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS 4
  • Framer Motion
  • Vercel AI SDK
  • Google Gemini 3 Flash
  • Whisper STT
  • Bhashini
  • Beckn Protocol v1.2.0
  • ONDC Catalogue Schema
  • AgMarkNet API
  • PostgreSQL 16
  • Docker · Docker Compose
  • GCP-ready

Act V · Proof

Compliant. Containerised. Ready for mainnet.

AI for Bharat Hackathon 2026

Built end-to-end as a research prototype for the AI for Bharat 2026 track on rural digital commerce. Public source. Reproducible builds.

One-command setup

autoconfig.bat on Windows, autoconfig.sh on Linux and macOS. The script installs Docker, Node.js and the database. App live at localhost:3001 in minutes.

100% compliant payloads, simulation mode

Mainnet ONDC access requires government registration and signing keys. Setu ships in simulation mode that produces 100% Beckn 1.2 compliant payloads ready for the live registry.

Documented protocol surface

Full Beckn protocol compliance document and a Real vs Simulated reference live in /docs. Every action shape is shown alongside the live ONDC schema it conforms to.

If a sentence can become a catalogue, any voice can sell.

I build voice-first, protocol-compliant, multilingual gateways onto India's public digital infrastructure. The kind of work that puts a farmer, a fisher, a weaver onto the same network as a national retailer.

Hire me Back to work