Smart Micro-Mandi: For Better Price Realization and Reduced Market Risks for the Smallholders

Abstract

Since last seven decades, every sector and sphere of life in India has changed in profound ways, except the way small and marginal farmers have been marketing their farm produce. Most of them still sell their produce to village traders or at local market at much lower price than what final consumers pay for it. The existing mandi system (regulated market) has been mostly self-serving or serving their masters, instead of its clients viz. farmers. The market participation of smallholders (small & marginal, landless & sharecroppers) in the existing mandi remain poor due to long distance of market, their uneconomic lot sizes to transport, time consuming process at mandi, varying quality of produce, and interlocking with village traders for financial needs. Therefore, there is urgent need of disruptive and innovative change in agricultural market to ensure level playing field for all the farmers. In April 2016, the Government of India launched an ambitious scheme of creating electronic platform for national agricultural market, known as E-NAM and so far, connected 585 regulated markets across major states. However, the inherent weaknesses in implementation of E-NAM has left sort of the desired results. The present brief gives a conceptual framework of new market model i.e. Smart Micro-Mandi (SMM), which envisages combination of E-NAM platform, strength of JAM (Jan Dhan account, Aadhar & Mobile) and application of modern technology like, sophisticated camera & sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Thing (IoT). Such mandi would be agnostic to land-size. It has capability to offer multiple benefits to the farmers by compressing the value chain, minimizing role of middlemen, efficient price discovery, and most importantly reversing the market risks for the smallholders.