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Almost 18 months have gone by since the PM launched the electronic National Agriculture Market (eNAM), hailed as the most disruptive intervention to improve farm incomes in the country. Over 450 mandis across 13 States have shown willingness to be part of this seamless online trading of farm commodities.
But what emerges now is that eNAM has so far been able to cover very little ground. In a country where 70 per cent of a total 500 million tonnes of agricultural produce comes to the marketplace every year and agriculture and allied sectors account for over ₹20 lakh crorein GVA, the recorded trading of commodities worth a modest sum of ₹31,500 crore on the portal since inception casts poor light on this scheme — said to be closely monitored by the PMO. More so, when it is known that even this minuscule share of the pie captured in eNAM is not largely an online trade in the right sense of the word. Both Central and State government officials have admitted that a lion’s share of the trade recorded in the eNAM portal was actually carried out offline and the values were fed into the portal to make it look like genuine online transactions. For instance, Haryana, which topped the list of States that traded on the eNAM portal with a share of over ₹14,000 crore, according to media reports, has carried out almost 60 per cent of transactions in physical form. This trend is seen in mandis across States.
This completely defeats the purpose as the main objective of an online auction portal is to help price discovery. Probably, eNAM planners have a lot more to learn from Karnataka whose model they are trying to ape.
However, the Centre is not solely responsible for this. The States opting for eNAM must make the necessary changes in their agricultural marketing policies and by introducing structural adjustments. The Centre’s recent move to link further release of funds under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana to progress in agri reforms and in implementation of eNAM may hopefully put pressure on the States.
Senior Deputy Editor
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