The agriculture ministry has approved integration of 21 additional mandis in Rajasthan to the digital wholesale platform electronicNational Agriculture Market (e-NAM), taking the number of physical markets linked to the platform to over 1,400 across states.
Sources told FE that there are several states who have approached the ministry to integrate more mandi into e-NAM aimed at boosting inter-state trade of agricultural commodities. Since the launch of e-NAM in April 2016, 1389 mandis have been integrated to the e-NAM platform across 27 states and union territories so far.
The number of mandis integrated into the digital platform includes Tamil Nadu (157), Rajasthan (145), Gujarat (144), Madhya Pradesh (139), Maharashtra (133), Uttar Pradesh (125) and Haryana (108).
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Agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has recently announced that over 1,500 more mandis will be integrated with the e-NAM.
With more states opening up or facilitating trade of agricultural commodities on e-NAM, trade on the digital wholesale platform crossed Rs 39,000 crore during April-October 2024-25, up 6% on year. In the last five years, annual trade on the digital wholesale market run by the agriculture ministry has increased by 110% to Rs 78,424 crore in FY24 from Rs 34,940 crore in 2019-20.
Sources said that there has also been a significant spurt in inter-mandi and inter-state trading of agri-commodities on the digital platform. They said that while the volume of farm gate, inter-state and inter-mandi trade is still a small portion of total turnover of e-NAM, it indicates a gradual shift to the digital platform, being used for better price discovery by the farmers.
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The ministry has urged states to relax norms including allowing traders from outside to buy and sell commodities without bank guarantee, provisioning of unified license for seamless statewide trade access and procurement from farm gate.
Through the platform farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir have sold several commodities paddy, maize, cotton, cauliflower, onion and tomato without physically transporting commodities to mandis using farm gate purchase model through e-NAM.
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