Government Plans to Expand Digital Agriculture Market; Know Why Farmers Should Register on e-NAM?

Recently, Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has shared the government’s plan to expand the digital agriculture market e-NAM by adding more mandis to it. He said that during the lockdown, the government would be taking several initiatives for the digital platform to clear the blockage faced by the wholesale markets and supply chain.

As of now, the e-NAM platform has 585 mandis. The government is planning to add 415 mandis to it, making the count reach a mark of 1000.

 Talking about the potential of the digital platform e-NAM, Tomar said, “e-NAM is an innovative initiative in agricultural marketing to enhance farmers accessibility digitally to multiple numbers 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.”

As per reports, since its inception in 2016, e-NAM has registered more than 1.66 crore farmers and 1.28 Lakh traders on its platform. “Farmers are free to register on the 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 added.

Sharing some deeper insights about the platform, Minister said, “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 the 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.” 

Why Should Farmers Register on e-NAM? 

Digitization has become quite an essential thing, especially in today’s time when the world economy is going through a crisis. The digitization of agriculture-related processes will make a huge difference in the farmers’ position. e-NAM gives so many opportunities to the farmers as well as other professionals involved in agriculture for flourishing their business. Some of the benefits of registering with e-NAM platform are as follows: 

• It provides more options for selling produce and give competitive returns.

• It provides access to the national market for secondary trading.

• It gives bulk buyers, processors, and exporters, direct participation in the local mandi trade, which further reduces intermediation cost.

• Consumers get stable prices of the produce.