Digital Agriculture Essay

Objective:

The scheme aims at providing adequate and timely cred it for the comprehensive credit requirements of farmers under single window for their cultivation and other needs as indicated below:

• To meet the short term credit requirements for cultivation of crops
• Post harvest expenses
• Produce Marketing loan
• Consumption requirements of farmer household
• Working capital for maintenance of farm assets, activities allied to agriculture, like dairy animals, inland fishery and also working capital required for floriculture, horticulture etc.
• Investment credit requirement for agriculture and allied activities like pump sets, sprayers, dairy animals, floriculture, horticulture etc.

An agricultural eBay of sorts has brought together more than 3 lakh farmers with 2000 buyers, including Reliance Fresh, Jubilant Foods, and ITC. Business is brisk.Sinceit kicked off eight months ago, the portal – “Krishidoot” – has received 35,000 queries. Farmers have sold 13,000 quintals of produce such as grain, vegetables, flowers and soyabean, worth Rs 2.5 crore, to their online buyers. And made up to 18% more money than before. In return, farmers are buying seeds, pesticides, crop insurance, godown space and even personal loans from the same portal.In 10 states where it is working, the APMC Act permits a corporate to buy directly from the FPO under a special license.

The sheer convenience has made it a winning concept. Queries can be texted, leaving no need for a computer. These are instantly matched with buyer demands.Reuters Market Light, which runs the portal on behalf of the Small Farmers Agri-business Consortium, a government-owned incubation company, follows up with personal calls to each party. The rest of the transaction – price, quality, delivery – is decided by buyer and seller offline on terms that are invariably better than usual. Easy. Efficient. Value-for-money. The techno-savvy supply chain for farm produce.

But rural online retail isn’t the real story here. This portal is special because it is India’s first agri B2B site. The 3 lakh farmers are shareholders in 300 farmer producer companies registered under the Companies Act. It is these companies that do business on Krishidoot.

These companies have one objective: grab maximum share of the consumer’s rupee. So, through aggregating produce for negotiating power, value addition through pre-sorting, grading, sometimes even processing, long-term retail contracts, and smart technology like e-auctions, they try not to leave any money on the table for middlemen.

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