Participation of different stakeholders in electronic national agriculture market : An assessment

Abstract

In a country like India, wherein more than 83 per cent of the farmers are small and marginal with small marketablesurplus is a major constraint for market accessibility and thereby deprived off getting remunerative prices for their produce.In this direction, National Agriculture Market (eNAM) is a pan-India electronic trading portal which networks the existingAPMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities. The main aim of eNAM is to integrate theAPMCs across the country through a common online market platform to facilitate pan-India trade in agriculture commodities,providing better price discovery through transparent auction process based on quality of produce along with timely onlinepayment. The integration of markets help in removing information asymmetry between buyers and sellers and promotingreal time price discovery based on actual demand and supply. The present paper is an attempt to know the functioning ofe-NAM. The e-NAM was introduced in 1000 APMCs spread over in 21 states across the country. The data were collectedfrom the e-NAM portal to know the participation of different stakeholders’ viz., farmers, traders, commission agents,FPOs, APMCs and mandi board in different states. At present, 1.69 crores of farmers, 1.55 lakh traders, 0.88 lakh ofcommission agents and 1836 FPOs are participating in eNAM mandies for the country as a whole. There exists interstatevariation among these stakeholders in using the eNAM portal. This needs to be reduced to enable transparent and hasslefree trade environment for the farming community