Last week, Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi's national agriculture market (NAM) came into action. The aim of the project is to create a nationwide electronic platform where farmers from across the country can sell their produce to buyers over online markets.
Journalist Karan Sharma writes that the launch of NAM seems to ignore the results of the Digital India mission; a program that came into action on July 1 last year, which aimed to provide digital literacy across hundreds of thousands of Indian villages. The mission in fact highlighted how successive governments have failed to provide digital knowledge to far-flung villages. Hence, Sharma suggests that the launch of NAM well overestimates the success of Digital India and infers that within one year of its launch, India has become a digital superpower.
Moreover, in India, there are no grading standards for agricultural produce and the farmers sell their produce on an as-is-where-is basis. Another important point is that the sale of agricultural produce is done by sampling. For instance, you are shown a sample lot and based on that you purchase the entire truck full of produce or maybe 100 gunny bags. The interesting feature is that you cannot hold the seller responsible if the entire lot is inferior to the sample.
Now considering the reality of the sale procedure - imagine a seller based in Maharashtra offering a certain quantity of onions for sale, online through NAM, and a buyer in Delhi willing to buy that in Delhi at a certain price. Once the sale is affected and the produce is loaded, there will be a loss in transit (80 percent of onion is water), damages (as agricultural produce is highly perishable) and the risk that the entire lot will not adhere to the sample quality.
In these circumstances, uniform standards for quality, grading and processing are needed. Only then can a standardised product be offered for sale successfully.
Sharma explains that the biggest problems faced by farmers are small land holdings, lack of water for irrigation, inadequate or no access to credit at zero per cent or low interests. Thus, he concludes that it is difficult to see how NAM could be a game changer in agriculture, as it does not address any of these problems.
