COVID-19: e-NAM takes steps to regularise movement of agricultural produce

The lockdown has massively impacted the movement of agricultural produce in the country in the form of trucks being not allowed to be plied, lack of trucks available. The electronic National Agricultural Marketplace, eNAM has swung into action.

The agriculture ministry has initiated several steps to decongest wholesale markets & to make supply chain agile that includes recently launched modules under e-NAM.

Some of the steps include:
Warehouse based trading module enabling farmers to sell their produce from WDRA registered warehouses notified as deemed market & FPO trading module, enabling FPOs to upload produce from collection centers with picture/ quality parameter and also avail bidding facility without going to mandis, which will reduce their logistic costs and hassle to sell their produce.

As a part of the regular efforts, even before the COVID-19 crises, eNAM has taken efforts, which will help ease the current situation. In order to debottleneck logistics of agri produce and providing adequate and timely transportation facility to the farmers/traders during lockdown period, e-NAM platform has created an interface with large transport aggregators like Blackbuck, Rivigo, Mavyn, Truck Suvidha, Truck Guru, Transin Logistics, Elastic Run etc. This would help traders to find and arrange timely movement of produces from mandi to various other locations. With this interface, Traders would be able to access more than 7.76 lakh trucks through eNAM Platform.

e-NAM platform/ mobile app has been further strengthened with ‘Farmers friendly’ features such as advance registration of the lot through app which in turn will reduce waiting time for farmers at gate entry of the mandi and will bring huge efficiency and will facilitate smooth arrival recording at gate.

States like Jharkhand has initiated farm gate trading through National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) platform whereby farmers are uploading the details of their produce along with picture for online bidding without reaching to the APMC. Similarly, FPOs are also uploading their produce from their collection centers for trading under e-NAM.

eNAM – Four years on
The pan-India agriculture trading portal e-NAM completes four years on April 14, 2020. It is moving towards the vision of realizing “One Nation, One Market” for agri-produce. Keeping in view the need of making marketing of commodities easier for farmers, e-NAM was envisioned and launched by Prime Minster in 21 mandis on April 14, 2016 which has now reached 585 mandis across 16 States and 02 UTs.

On this occasion, Union Minister for Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers’ Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar said that e-NAM is an innovative initiative in agricultural marketing to enhance farmers accessibility digitally to multiple number of markets and 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 also said that e-NAM is being expanded to cover additional 415 mandis which will take the total number of e-NAM mandis to 1000 soon. He also added that this online platform will prove to be a giant leap in reforming the agriculture market in India.

He further said that more than 1.66 crore farmers and 1.28 Lakh traders registered on e-NAM platform.

e-NAM has recorded a total trade volume of 3.39 cr MT of bulk commodities & 37 lakh numbers of Bamboo & Coconut worth approximately Rs One Lakh crore. The Compound average growth rate (CAGR) in the last four years has been 28 percent & 18 percent in value and volume terms respectively.

Average number of bids per lot across India has increased from 2 bid per lot in 2016-17 to nearly 4 bid per lot in 2019-20. During peak harvest season, in some of the Mandis like Adoni, Andhra Pradesh -primarily cotton market has seen more than15 Bids /Lot, helping Farmers to get more buyers in a transparent and competitive way.

Initially started with 25 commodities, e-trade facilities provided on 150 commodities with tradable parameters on e-NAM portal. Quality assaying testing facilities is being provided in e-NAM mandis which helps famers in getting prices commensurate with quality of their produce. No. of lots assayed has increased from 01 lakh in 2016-17 to nearly 37 lakh lots in 2019-20 .

Farmers can now see the assaying report on the go. They can see the progress of bids for their lot being traded, through mobile and also get the real time information on prices in nearby mandis. Electronic weighing scales have been provided to accurately weigh the commodities after bidding on e-NAM platform to bring transparency in weighing. Payment to farmers by traders now can be done through mobile phone using BHIM payment facility.

For traders the additional OTG (On the Go) features have been added such as buyers bidding from anywhere even without physically present in the mandi, e-NAM shopping cart facility in trader login, single e-payment transaction features for multiple Invoices/ bunching of multiple invoices, automatic discount/ rebate on e-Payment/ discount to traders during e-payment, online registration for unified trading license etc. to name a few.  To build confidence among the traders for assaying, the Department has launched new features related to assaying like :

• 360 degree image capturing of the commodity heap through e-NAM mobile app,
• Assayer can upload 2/3 2D image of Laboratory with equipment and
• Also upload 2D image of commodity sampling process for the lot for better confidence of trader on e-NAM.

In order to enhance the e-NAM ecosystem and to build up direct link between traders & Farmers, 977 farmer producer organizations from 16 States have been on-boarded on e-NAM platform.

The platform has seen a pick-up in inter-mandi trade both within and, more recently, between states. So far, 13 States/ UT have participated in inter State trade (Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand& Tamil Nadu).Inter-state trade has been recorded in 20 commodities (which include vegetables, pulses, cereals, oilseeds, spices etc.)

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