New Delhi: The government plans to expand the coverage of digital agriculture market – e-NAM – to 1000 mandis. Agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that the government will add 415 mandis to e-NAM platform to expand its coverage form existing 585 mandis.
“e-NAM is an innovative initiative in agricultural marketing to enhance farmers accessibility digitally to multiple number of markets & buyers and to bring transparency in trade transactions with the intent to improve price discovery mechanism, quality commensurate price realization and also to develop the concept of One Nation One Market for agriculture produce,” he said.
Tomar said that during current Covid19 lockdown, the government several initiatives on e-NAM platform to decongest wholesale markets and to make supply chain agile.
“We introduced warehouse based trading module enabling farmers to sell their produce from WDRA registered warehouses notified as deemed market. The FPO trading module, enabled FPOs to upload produce from collection centers with picture/ quality parameter and also avail bidding facility without going to mandis,” he said.
e-NAM, which was launched in 2016, has more than 1.66 crore farmers and 1.28 Lakh traders registered on its digital platform. “Farmers are free to register on e-NAM portal and they are uploading their produce for sale online to the traders across all e-NAM mandis and traders can bid for the lots available for sale on e-NAM from any location,” Tomar said.
Union agriculture secretary Sanjay Agarwal said that the online and transparent bidding system has been farmers to increasingly trade on e-NAM platform.
“Total trade volume of 3.39 crore tonnes of bulk commodities and 37 lakh numbers of Bamboo & Coconut worth approximately Rs one lakh crore has been recorded on e-NAM platform. The Compound average growth rate (CAGR) in the last four years has been an impressive 28% and 18% in value and volume terms respectively,” he said
Source: indiatimes.com
