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Horticulture exchange Praman.Ai — powered by Intello Lab’s proprietary instant quality assessment technology facilitating trade discovery and settlement in horticulture commodities such as onion, cardamom, apples, garlic, etc — has helped settle over ₹50 crore of trade value during the current apple harvest season across Kashmir.
Praman.Ai has been demonstrating and putting to use its proprietary AI quality assaying technology to connect buyers from across the country with the apple growers and cold storages of Kashmir.
Digital quality
A statement said by opening the mandis to digital quality assessment of the produce, linked with online auctions for trade discovery, Praman.Ai has ensured that the apple trade flourishes in the valley through objectivity, consistency and speed in the entire post-harvest supply chain.
It said that this harvest season has resulted in over ₹50 crore of trade value being settled across Kashmir through Praman’s digital quality assessment and price discovery in just a month. Over 200 sellers and buyers are participating on a daily basis, and over 2,000 trades are being settled in a month, it said.
Kashmir is home to almost 100-plus varieties of apple. More than 40 per cent of Kashmir’s 80 lakh people, including seven lakh farmers, are involved in the apple trade. It said that growers and buyers are often distraught over the lack of quality assaying mechanisms and unreliable payment methods, leading to most of them feeling short-changed in the current trade process. Added to this, growers often face limited access to outside markets and buyers and hence are unable to get fair prices for their produce.
Quoting Chief Executive Officer, Saurabh S, the statement said the efforts of Praman have yielded positive results for the entire apple ecosystem in Kashmir with the forward looking outlook of the Jammu and Kashmir Horticulture Board and their officers at various mandis. Their efforts have been unrelenting in bringing the benefits of digitisation to the apple growers across the valley, he said.
Khan Mukhtar, Area Marketing Officer at Directorate of Horticulture Planning and Marketing, Jammu and Kashmir, said the department — in association with Praman — has started digitisation of fruit mandi in Kulgam, first in the Union Territory to have such a digital marketing platform.
Praman has successfully re-engineered auctions and trade through AI-based quality assessment, making them data-driven and digital. The quality reports are fed directly into the exchange platform thus fetching better prices to the farmers, he said.
The digital quality assessment technology deployed at Praman provides spot quality assessment checks that are digital, verifiable, and scalable at every stage of the value chain. It said Praman’s proprietary technology has also gone a long way in solving inventory management, logistics, sorting, grading, and packaging of horticulture produce.
Multi-commodity sorters
As a next step, Praman.Ai shall be deploying the multi-commodity, multi-channel sorter for automating the sorting and grading of apples at the mandis in Kashmir. These sorters will provide the opportunity to growers to grade their produce and sell it at differential pricing basis quality. Buyers will be able to avail of the grading service and pack similar grades together for ease of warehousing, logistics and further sales to consumers, the statement added.
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