The editorial, “Reboot e-NAM” (July 15), is absolutely right when it says that e-NAM is not supposed to be a parallel marketing structure; it is essentially a means to leverage the physical marketing infrastructure of existing mandis to enable sellers and buyers to participate in countrywide trading on an electronic platform.
It would be in the fitness of things if the rural development department of the National Institute of Bank Management could be approached to survey/study bottlenecks across a sample of 585 mandis and provide vital inputs to strengthen and provide further momentum to the e-NAM model.
We have the best agriculture universities, which could be entrusted to provide worthy inputs for the betterment of the electronic agriculture market. Besides, new small finance banks equipped with the latest technology have adequate potential to market current accounts in all agriculture markets and mandis with a digital push, resulting in innovative products that suit different dimensions of e-NAM.
There is a huge opportunity to bootstrap credit-linked schemes for cooperative banks and new small finance banks in e-NAM. Before our all-important National Payments Corporation of India comes up for interoperability of ATMs, it is imperative that banks go through various stages like Swadhan, BANCs, Cashnet, MITR and the National Financial Switch to revolutionise the banking industry.
Similarly, cooperative banks and new small banks might have to go through a couple of stages to finally capture the entire electronic national agriculture market, resulting in scaling up of their bottom lines.
The National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (Nabard) recently completed 36 years and has been doing painstaking work across India through different schemes. It has built up a huge movement in rural India. Hassle-free movement of schemes by Nabard to push surplus produce anywhere in India for e-NAM would be timely.
N K Bakshi Ahmedabad
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