Modi's National Agriculture Market brings more suffering to farmers

Last year on July 1, our prime minister launched Digital India mission, which aimed at providing digital literacy across 2,50,000 villages. The mission, amongst the other things, recognised the poor awareness of digital knowledge across far-flung villages and brought into focus the stark reality of how successive governments have failed to disseminate the impact of policy and created a socio-economic-electronic divide in the country.

Last week, the much hyped national agriculture market (NAM) was flagged off by the prime minister, which aims to create a nationwide electronic platform where farmers from across the country can sell their produce to buyers over online mandies.

Consider it to be a bourgeois mindset or the fate of the weak, the people sitting in their big air-conditioned rooms decide how the farmer will toil in the sun and hence agriculture, once a mainstay of our economy, has now been reduced to a virtual constituency and farmers to a gullible vote bank.

The launch of NAM either undermines the fact and data on the basis of which the Digital India mission was launched. It is propelled by extreme romanticism and overestimation of the success of Digital India, which infers that within one year of its launch, we have become a digital superpower.

Now, the ministry of agriculture has mandated SFAC, a society promoted by department of agriculture and co-operation, to steer the entire NAM mission. SFAC first gained mileage in 2015 when its name surfaced in the onion scam in Delhi government.

It was SFAC that procured onion for the Delhi government last year during the shortfall and allegedly sold the same to Delhi government at higher prices than the procurement rate. Even then, surprisingly, it has been given the responsibility to steer the NAM, which makes manifest the level of seriousness of the government about the mission.

Now if you have been to a mandi yourself, or seen your mother buying from the local vendor, you must have noticed how she picks and chooses each and every piece herself and segregates it from the lot - the process is called grading.

In India, we do not have grading standards for agricultural produce and the farmers sell their produce on an as-is-where-is basis. Another important point is that the sale of agricultural produce is done by sampling. For instance, you are shown a sample lot and based on that you purchase the entire truck full of produce or may be 100 gunny bags. The interesting feature is that you cannot hold the seller responsible if the entire lot is inferior to the sample.

Now considering the reality of the sale procedure - imagine a seller based in Maharashtra offering a certain quantity of onions for sale, online through NAM, and a buyer in Delhi willing to buy that in Delhi at a certain price. Once the sale is affected and the produce is loaded, there will be loss in transit (80 percent of onion is water), damages (as agricultural produce is highly perishable) and the risk that the entire lot will not adhere to the sample quality.

In these circumstances, we first need uniform standards for quality, grading and processing. Only then can a standardised product be offered for sale successfully.

Another brownie point rallying around NAM is ironing out the unwanted intermediaries (arhtiyas) involved in the process. It is important to note that, in 2013, 11 states including Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh have deregulated the perishables (fruits and vegetables) excluding them from the purview of APMC act. This means farmers are no longer required to sell their produce to the licensed arhtyias and anyone willing to trade in agricultural produce can set up a deregulated market outside the much criticised APMC markets. Strangely, the only beneficiaries of this deregulation are Adanis, Reliance and other big corporate houses who no longer have to pay market fee for trading in these agricultural commodities and purchase huge chunk of produce on an advance-contract basis.

Interestingly, Maharashtra too along these lines, has moved a step towards deregulating fruits and vegetables, but the incumbent government has specifically refused to deregulate them and chosen not to exclude them from the purview of APMC act. Needless to say that none of the mandies of Maharashtra have been included in the list of the 21 mandies who have been selected for the first phase of NAM.

At present, the few of the biggest problems faced by farmers are small land holdings, lack of water for irrigation, inadequate or no access to credit at zero per cent or low interests. In the prevailing scenario, I, for one, fail to see how the NAM is a game changer in these aspects and hope this too is not rendered redundant just like many other jumlas.