The Union Food and Public Distribution Minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Tuesday paved way for paperless marketing of agricultural commodities by issuing the country’s first electronic negotiable warehouse receipt (eNWR) to a farmer from Rajasthan.

These e-receipts issued against agricultural produce that farmers have stored in warehouses registered with the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) offer multiple benefits to farmers.

Apart from making it possible for farmers to sell their produce in mandis of their choice across the country, they can pledge the eNWRs in part or full to raise loans to meet their requirements. “More importantly, farmers availing such facilities do not need to resort to distress sale, which has been hitting farmers’ income in the country very badly,” Paswan said.

The Minister also launched a portal set up be the WDRA which will allow warehouses across the country to register with the authority without any paperwork. “The portal is designed in such a way that it can handle all the needs of warehousemen with ease and they don’t have to visit the WDRA even once,” WDRA member Petluri Srinivas said explaining the feature of the new portal.

The WDRA has also engaged six agencies in different parts of the country, which would inspect these warehouses and confirm whether they were conforming to the standards prescribed.

Paswan, however, expressed that only 900 warehouses have been registered with the authority even though there are around 64,000 warehouses of varying capacity exist in the country. He hoped that the authority would make an all-out effort to bring in maximum number of warehouses and cold storage facilities under its purview so that farmers would benefit more.

The WDRA also issued registration certificates to two entities that have been elected to create repositories for eNWRs.

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