Business of Agriculture March April 2019 Edition | Page 27

Digital Literacy to Leverage
e-NAMs is Lacking
In a country where general literacy covers a sizeable
population and access to the internet has enabled
an enviable smartphone penetration, the digital
Historically, such bumper productions are good news
to statisticians who can play around with the figures
to show how increased production pushed down
the wholesale price index (WPI) and consumer price
index (CPI), and thereby kept the dreaded inflation
under check, and retail customers who are flooded
with choice, we may doubt how useful that ultimately
proves to be. Farmers are the last ones to reap the
benefit. The time for change it is here.
Locating
warehouses
on the
highway
will ensure
that the
farmers are
able to save
their crops
until a more
favourable
time to sell
them
one of the major reasons that agriculture producers
struggle to find a way to the markets. India’s road
network too is far from adequate – according to the
figures available in ‘Statistical Year Book India 2017’,
out of a total highway (state and national) length of
265,100 km, 263,263 km is surfaced while out of a
total of Panchayati Raj and Rural Roads of 1,831,043
km and 2,437,255 km, respectively, only 986,075 km
and 1,486,069 km, respectively, have been surfaced
or concretised. These roads are key to ensure that
farmers growing crops in the interiors of the country
can sell their produce, either through physical access
to the markets or through e-NAM (electronic
National Agriculture Market).
coverage among farmers remains questionable. These
people still depend on age-old practices which are
often unproductive, if not counterproductive. As a
result, the government’s move to e-NAMs (National
Agricultural Markets) bore limited fruit. The physical
access to mandis is a task for many farmers, especially
the small and marginal ones. Though only around 600
mandis are enrolled in the e-NAM system, and there
is an urgent need to improve their performance to
encourage sponsors to raise their bids and compete
to enrol farmers to secure input supplies, farmers
are yet to take advantage as many of them are not
digitally adept.
* Rajesh Aggarwal is the Managing Director of
Insecticides (India) Limited since 2006. Under this
dynamic leadership, IIL has now become one of the top
ten players in the agrochemicals manufacturing industry.
He has taken IIL to new heights with e revenue of the
company growing manifold. Under his leadership, the
revenues have leapfrogged to more than Rs 1,100 crore
in FY 2017-2018.
Business of Agriculture
| March-April 2019 • Vol. V • Issue 2
27