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.

Two software modules – warehouse-based trading module to facilitate trade from warehouses and farmer producer organisations’ 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.

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. Many southern states have scaled up the system.

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. “These changes can help farmers already integrated into the online trading platform, but many states are yet to go fully online,” said professor R Mani of the Tamil Nadu agricultural university.

THE E-NAM FACILITY WAS

LAUNCHED ON APRIL 14, 2016 AS A PAN-INDIAN ELECTRONIC TRADE PORTAL LINKING MARKETS. THERE ARE 585 MANDIS IN 16 STATES AND TWO UTS ON THE PORTAL