Farmers to access buyers from nearest warehouses after e-NAM update

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 said on Friday.

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 said on Friday.

A farmer feeds iceberg lettuce to his buffalo during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to slow the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Bhuinj village in Satara district in Maharashtra. (REUTERS)

Two software modules – warehouse-based trading module to facilitate trade from warehouses and farmer producer organizations’ module – are aimed at reducing the need to physically move entire harvests to aggregators to contract a sale.

This essentially means farmers will be able to access buyers through the mobile software from the nearest warehouses. The second update aims to allow farmer collectives to connect to the e-NAM network from their own collection centres.

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A chain of electronic national agricultural markets, called e-NAM, serves as an online trading system. Farmers only have to bring a small sample of their produce, which is then evaluated by agricultural “assayers”. Once graded by assayers, 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. FPO stands for farmer producer organisations, which are producer groups who pool in land and other resources to bring efficiency in farming. APMC stands for agricultural produce marketing committees, which run agricultural markets around the country.

An enhanced version of the 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 a pan-India electronic trade portal linking markets across 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.

“These changes can help farmers already integrated into the online trading platform, but many states are yet to go fully online. Many states haven’t appointed assayers from instance,” said professor R Mani of the Tamil Nadu agricultural university.