E-Paper
Covid-19: Govt updates online farm trading platform for easier harvest sale
Coronavirus in India: The move by government essentially means farmers will be able to access buyers through the mobile software from nearest warehouses.
The Union government has updated the electronic national agriculture markets or the E-Nam, an online trading platform, with two new software updates so that farmers don’t have to travel long distance to sell their harvests, the agriculture ministry has said.
Two software modules – warehouse-based trading module to facilitate trade from warehouses and farmer producer organisations’ module – are aimed at reducing the need physically move entire harvests to aggregators to contract a sale.
The move has been initiated in the wake of the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed to stop the spread of Covid-19.
This essentially means farmers will be able to access buyers through the mobile software from nearest warehouses. The second update aims to allow farmer collectives to connect to the E-NAM network from their own collection centres.
A chain of electronic national agricultural markets, called e-NAM, serves an online trading system. Farmers only have to bring a small sample of their produce, which is then evaluated by agricultural “assayists”. Once graded by assayists, the sample report can be accessed by any buyer in any state. Many southern states have scaled up the system.
“FPO trading module in e-NAM whereby FPOs can trade their produce from their collection centre without bringing the produce to APMC,” a statement from the ministry said.
An enhanced version of logistic module has been incorporated into the online trading module. Aggregators of transport logistic platform have been “on boarded” on it, which helps users to avail trackable transport facilities for transporting their produce, the ministry said.
The e-NAM facility was launched on 14 April 2016 as an all-India electronic trade portal linking markets across She States. There are 585 mandis in 16 States and two Union territories that have been integrated on the e-NAM portal.
Farmer collectives can upload a picture of their produce and quality parameters from their premises to help distant bidders to visualise the produce before bidding. They have the option for delivery of produce either from their premises or by bringing to mandi premise after successful bidding. This will not only decongest the mandis but also reduce the logistics cost for the farmer producer organization, the ministry added.
