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What's the article about?
- It talks about the progress made by the electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM).
Relevance:
- GS3: Storage, Transport and Marketing of Agricultural Produce and Issues and Related Constraints; E-technology in the aid of farmers;
- Prelims
Context:
- To make better price realization possible for farmers, the Union Government launched the electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) in April 2016. It has been proven to be successful so far.
What is e-NAM?
- It was launched by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare as a pan-India electronic trade portal linking Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) across the States.
- It was launched to catalyse the digital transformation of mandi or marketplace operations for the trading of agricultural commodities.
- The objective was to create a transparent online competitive bidding system to enable farmers to secure remunerative prices for their produce.
- It provides for contactless remote bidding and mobile-based anytime payment for which traders do not need to either visit mandis or banks for the same.
Analysis:
- Increased Trade Volume:
- The trade volumes on the e-NAM platform have steadily gathered pace, improving market access of farmers and creating a unified national market for agricultural produce.
- Overall turnover of e-NAM in this fiscal till February stood at 67,000 crore, up by 40% from a year earlier.
- For a sense of perspective, this represents 13% of the annual trade in farm goods, excluding milk and marine products, that is in excess of 5 trillion.
- Diversification of crops:
- e-NAM trade now covers a growing list of commodities like apples, saffron, ragi (finger millets), jeera (cumin seeds), chana (gram), soyabean, copra, and silk cocoons.
- Integration of public and private sector:
- Private entities providing services such as transportation, logistics, assaying, weather forecast and fintech are also being integrated into the platform to enable more farmers to sell their produce to buyers of their choice.
- At present, 1,260 mandis in 22 states and Union territories are integrated with e-NAM.
- Around 17.5 million farmers, 2,433 farmer producer organisations,0.24 million traders, 0.1 million commission agents and other stakeholders are currently registered with e-NAM.
- The platform thus has reached critical mass or scale to significantly improve farmer incomes.
- Realising the idea of One Nation One Market:
- The progress towards “One Nation One Market”—which enables efficient price discovery—has been facilitated by inter-state trade which has recently commenced with farmers from Kashmir, Maharashtra and Rajasthan selling their produce to buyers in Kerala, Odisha, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.
Way Forward:
- Clearly, e-NAM has some distance to cover which is predicated on the faster growth of inter-state trade in agricultural produce.
- The fact that farmers are increasingly accessing this platform for getting real-time information on prices prevailing in various mandis is the best augury for securing the best prices for their produce to improve their incomes.
- While e-NAM has no doubt made progress, there is a need to strengthen the platform further.
- Various suggestions in the past made by apex chambers like Ficci in a 2017 report and agricultural economists.
- More agri-market reforms are needed starting with basics of assaying, sorting, and grading facilities for primary produce as per nationally recognised and accepted standards.
- Suitable infrastructure at the mandi-level (like godowns, cold storages, and driers) needs to be created to maintain those standards.
- A national integrated dispute resolution mechanism needs to be evolved to tackle cases where the quality of goods delivered varies from what is shown and bid for on the electronic platform.
