National Agriculture Market (eNAM)

National Agriculture Market (eNAM), launched on 14^th April, 2016 is a pan-India electronic trading portal which seeks to network the existing physical APMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities. NAM seeks to address the limitations of current APMC mandis and is being implemented by Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), by Ministry of Agriculture.

Objectives

The scheme was launched with the following objectives-

• Promoting uniformity in agriculture marketing by streamlining of procedures across the integrated markets.
• Removing information asymmetry between buyers and sellers.
• Promoting real time price discovery based on actual demand and supply.

It is step towards the concept of ‘One Nation One Market’ and expands the market access for farmers.

Challenges

• Liberal licensing of traders/buyers and commission agents by State authorities without any pre-condition of physical presence or possession of shop /premises in the market yard has resulted in reported cases of unfair trade practices.
• Bringing uniformity along the agricultural market at the national level as ‘agriculture’ is a state subject.
• The need for strengthening, upgrading and expanding agricultural marketing facilities across the country.
• There are fiscal constraints among states to develop quality testing laboratories.

Possibilities and Prospects

• Promoting inter-State trade between mandis of two different States to realize dream of ‘One Nation One Market’.
• Develop an inter-state dashboard on e-NAM platform to promote inter-state trade among e-NAM states.
• “Logistic providers” information needs to be provided in e-NAM portal to traders from outside the State, to facilitate transportation of commodities after trading.
• Transition from subsistence farming through land consolidation, contract farming, increased awareness among farmers etc. is necessary to make e-NAM a success.