Increasing e-Nam footprint: 177 new mandis in 10 states integrated with online portal

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 11

Further increasing its footprint, the Agriculture Ministry, on Monday, integrated 177 new mandis from 10 States, including Haryana (26) and Punjab (17), on the electronic National Agriculture Market taking the total number of mandis on the online portal, enabling farmers to sell without visiting regulated mandis, to 962.

Mandis integrated on Monday include Gujarat (17), Haryana (26), J&K (1), Kerala (5), Maharashtra (54), Odisha (15), Punjab (17), Rajasthan (25), Tamil Nadu (13) and West Bengal (1).

Earlier this month, 200 new mandis were added to the existing 585 mandis online, including 54 in Haryana and 19 in Punjab.

Aimed at strengthening agriculture marketing, e-NAM provides a single-window service for all APMC-related information and services, including commodity arrivals, quality and prices, provision to respond to trade offers and electronic payment settlement directly into farmers’ accounts. However, the reach so far has been limited to mostly non-perishable produce. Inter-state transactions also remain an issue.

Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said efforts should be made to strengthen e-NAM further to benefit farmers.

According to Sandip Das from the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRI): “When inter-state trade is facilitated across all mandis through e-NAM platform, farmers get the benefit of the price discovery mechanism. Traders and buyers will have to be provided with a single license to conduct trade across the mandis in a state. With so many mandis coming on board, the government should ensure seamless trading of agricultural commodities across states.”

According to officials, the 785 mandis integrated with e-NAM across 17 states and two Union Territories has a user base of 1.66 crore farmers, 1.30 lakh traders and 71,911 commission agents.

As on May 9, as many as 3.43 crore MT and 37.93 lakh (bamboo and coconut), collectively worth more than Rs 1 lakh crore has been traded on the platform, and digital payment worth Rs 708 crore made, benefiting more than 1.25 lakh farmers.

As many as 236 mandis also participated in an inter-mandi trade across 12 states while 13 states/UTs participated in the inter-state trade, allowing farmers to interact directly with distantly located traders, they said.

Currently, 150 agri-commodities, including food grains, oilseeds, fibres, vegetables and fruits, are being traded on e-NAM, with around 1,005 registered FPOs trading 2,900 MT of agri-produce worth Rs 7.92 crore.

E-NAM, which aims to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities to promote uniformity in marketing by streamlining procedures, removing information asymmetry between buyers and sellers and promoting real-time price discovery based on actual demand and supply, remains the key focus of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to strengthen the sector amid the Covid-19 crisis, say officials.

Launched on April 14, 2016, the aim in the COVID-19 scenario is to develop the portal into a bigger platform to transform the trading of all farm-related commodities including seeds, fertilisers and agro-chemical plant protection inputs.