Key Facts: National Agriculture Market (NAM)

National Agriculture Market (NAM) through Agri-Tech Infrastructure Fund (ATIF) also known as e-NAM scheme was approved in July 2015 and was launched on April 14 2016 as a portal. The objective is to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities by integrating the APMCs across India in the states which desire to be part of this initiative.

NAM is implemented / promoted by SFAC

Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) is the lead promoter of NAM. SFAC is a registered society of Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare (DAC&FW) under Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare

NAM provides Single Window Service for APMCs

NAM provides single window service for all APMC related services and information, such as commodity arrivals and prices, provision for responding to the trade offers, buy and sell trade offers, among other services. The key facilities include:

• Enable farmers to showcase the produce through nearby markets and facilitate traders from anywhere to quote price
• Sale and Purchase transactions
• Liberal licensing policies for traders, buyers and commission agents.
• Single point of levy of market fees.
• Harmonization of quality standards.
• Provision of soil testing labs near or in the mandis.
• Facility to allow states to have their own platforms and link them with NAM

States need to suggest names of APMC to be included in project

Agriculture is a state subject so the state governments need to suggest name of the APMCs where this project needs to be launched. For this the states need to modify their APMC laws to make the following adjustments:

• There should be a single license to be valid across the state
• There should be a single point levy of market free
• There should be a provision in the law to allow electronic auction as a mode of price discovery.

Only those States/UTs that have completed these three pre-requisites are eligible for assistance under the scheme.

Budget 2017-18 has enhanced outlay for e-NAM

In the budget 2017-18, the government has announced mission to link 585 Mandis to the portal by March, 2018. As of now, around 250 markets have been covered. In the new budget, an assistance of up to Rs 75 lakh has been announced for every e-NAM.