Govt starts Rabi season procurement of pulses, oilseeds in 20 states

NEW DELHI, 24 April 2020: As of 22 April 2020, Indian agriculture and farmers welfare ministry has announced that its agencies have started procuring pulses and oilseeds from 20 states.

In a statement, the ministry said that a quantity of 167,570.95 metric tonnes of pulses and 111,638.52 metric tonnes of oilseeds has been procured by National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd.(NAFED) and Food Corporation of India (FCI) valued at INR 1313 crores through which 174,284 farmers have been benefited.

The ministry also said that it has constituted a separate cell for monitoring supply and prices of essential goods and fruits & vegetables along with inter-state movement for Northeast region.

Ministry monitoring opinion prices with Maharashtra

Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare is in touch with Maharashtra mandi board for supply of onion from the production areas of Maharashtra to other States.

Currently, the APMCs under Nashik District are sending on an average 300 trucks daily to various parts of the country viz., Delhi, Haryana, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kolkata, J&K, Karnataka, Odisha, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh etc. on a regular basis.

Several steps taken to decongest wholesale markets

Ministry has initiated several steps to decongest wholesale markets & to boost the supply chains. The National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) portal has been revamped by adding two (2) new modules viz., (a) warehouse based trading module and (b) Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) module.

The warehouse based trading module enables farmers to sell their produce from Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) registered warehouses notified as deemed markets.

The FPO trading module enables FPOs to upload their produce from collection centers with picture/ quality parameter for on-line bidding without physically reaching to the mandis.

So far FPOs from 12 States (Punjab, Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh & Jharkhand) have participated in the trade.

Jharkand state initiate farm-gate trading

States like Jharkhand has initiated farm-gate trading through e-NAM platform whereby farmers are uploading the details of their produce along with picture for online bidding without reaching to the APMC. Similarly, FPOs are also uploading their produce from their collection centers for trading under e-NAM.

Module of Uberisation of logistics aggregators has been recently launched on e-NAM platform. This would help traders to find out transporters available in their vicinity for faster movement of farm produce from mandi to various other locations. More than 11.37 lakh trucks & 2.3 lakh transporters are linked to this module.