Maharashtra govt to digitise private wholesale vegetable markets

Mumbai: The Maharashtra government has decided to digitise the functioning of private wholesale vegetable markets for better transparency and to prevent farmers from being cheated while selling their produce.

The Centre had earlier launched a pan-India electronic trading portal, called e-NAM (National Agriculture Market), to facilitate farmers, traders, buyers, exporters and processors with a common platform for trading commodities. The e-NAM portal keeps a database of the movement of vegetable produce, its distribution, prices and fluctuations.

The Maharashtra government is now planning to bring the private markets under the ambit of e-NAM, while it is also digitising the functioning of some of the major Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs) in the state.

“There are around 60 major APMCs in Maharashtra which are being digitised. All the farmers, traders and commission agents working there are shifting to the e-NAM platform. We have now also decided to make the e-NAM mandatory for private APMCs,” the state’s cooperation minister, Subhash Deshmukh, told PTI. More than 30 APMCs have already started the e-auction of the daily produce while 17 market committees have been conducting the quality testing, he said.