It was six years ago that Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14, 2016, launched “eNam”, an electronic National Agriculture Market and a pan-India trading portal. This move was in line with his vision to promote better marketing opportunities for agricultural produce, streamline mandi operations, promote price discovery by e-bidding, and establish quality-assaying systems.
Now, eNAM has successfully integrated 1,000 mandis of 18 states and three union territories. A total of more than 1.73 crore farmers, 2 lakh traders, and 2,000 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have registered themselves and are transacting in 175 notified commodities. A total volume of 5.65 crore metric tonne (MT) and 13.73 crore in numbers (betel leaf, coconut, bamboo, sweet corn, and lemon) of commodities worth Rs 1.87 lakh crore have been traded. The Centre is convinced that it has been successful in meeting its objectives.
eNAM is the flagship scheme of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare and Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) is the lead implementing agency under the Union Agriculture Ministry.
Initially, the adoption was slow, but with continued awareness creation and promotional activities, especially during the last three years, the eNAM portal is reaching the far corners of the country, say officials. It provides a single-window service for all Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC)-related information and services, which include commodity arrivals, quality and prices, provision to respond to trade offers, and electronic payment settlement directly into farmers’ accounts. This portal aims at reducing transaction costs, bridging information asymmetries, and helping the expansion of market access for farmers and FPOs. eNAM is accessible via web and mobile applications.
“In a short span of six years, a radical change has been observed in the APMC operations and stakeholder preferences,” said Neelkamal Darbari, managing director, Small Farmers’ Agri-Business Consortium (SFAC). “During the implementation phase, SFAC faced multiple challenges like amendments in APMC Act, adoption by States/UTs, infrastructure readiness at APMCs, etc. Steadily with constant persuasion, the pilot was conducted in 21 mandis in eight states in April 2016. Based on its successful response, 585 mandis were integrated by March 2018 and further 415 additional mandis were integrated in May 2020. Integration of 415 additional mandis was a remarkable achievement of SFAC as the process was initiated and completed during the Covid-19 lockdown, within the target timeline of May 2020. During the pandemic, the eNAM portal complied with social distancing norms of the Government of India by decongesting mandis and facilitated the transaction of agricultural produce remotely.”
In six years of its journey, eNAM has ushered in competence and transformed APMC mandi operations through technology interventions. The real-time information on commodity prices and arrivals, access to more buyers/sellers, transparency in trade by competitive bidding, thereby better price discovery, and better efficiency in overall mandi operations through digitalisation are significant features in its turnaround.
Going forward, say officials, SFAC is poised to expand eNAM presence in an additional 1000 mandis and strengthen the ecosystem by focusing on stakeholder handholding, introducing more commodities, strengthening the quality-assaying process, and providing ease of business by adding more and more user-friendly features based on stakeholder feedback.
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