PIB News Update: The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, Government of India is taking several measures to facilitate the farmers and farming activities at field level during the lock down period. The updated status is given below:
- During Rabi season 2020, the procurement of Pulses & Oilseeds on MSP is currently in progress in twenty (20) States. A quantity of 1,67,570.95 MT of Pulses and 1,11,638.52 MT of Oilseeds has been procured by NAFED and FCI valued at Rs 1313 Crores through which 1,74,284 farmers have been benefited.
- A separate cell has been constituted for monitoring supply and prices of essential goods and fruits & vegetables along with inter-state movement for Northeast region.
- Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare is in touch with Maharashtra mandi board for supply of onion from the production areas of Maharashtra to other States. Currently, the APMCs under Nashik District are sending on an average 300 trucks daily to various parts of the country viz., Delhi, Haryana, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kolkata, J&K, Karnataka, Odisha, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh etc. on a regular basis.
- Ministry has initiated several steps to decongest wholesale markets & to boost the supply chains. The National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) portal has been revamped by adding two (2) new modules viz., (a) warehouse based trading module and (b) Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) module. The warehouse based trading module enables farmers to sell their produce from Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) registered warehouses notified as deemed markets. The FPO trading module enables FPOs to upload their produce from collection centers with picture/ quality parameter for on-line bidding without physically reaching to the mandis. So far FPOs from 12 States (Punjab, Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh & Jharkhand) have participated in the trade.
- States like Jharkhand has initiated farm-gate trading through e-NAM platform whereby farmers are uploading the details of their produce along with picture for online bidding without reaching to the APMC. Similarly, FPOs are also uploading their produce from their collection centers for trading under e-NAM.
- Module of Uberisation of logistics aggregators has been recently launched on e-NAM platform. This would help traders to find out transporters available in their vicinity for faster movement of farm produce from mandi to various other locations. More than 11.37 lakh trucks & 2.3 lakh transporters are linked to this module.