Integration of agricultural produce marketing committee (APMC) yards or mandis with the National Agriculture Market (eNAM) is helping farmers get better prices for their produce, says R Leshma Manogna, Assistant Professor, BITS Goa.
“The integration of mandis is a huge advantage for farmers because they can see the prices scrolling on the eNAM platform. This avoids middlemen taking advantage of them,” Manogna told businessline in an online interaction. The BITS Goa assistant professor has done a NABARD-sponsored project to collect primary data in Goa to evaluate the gap in pricing in agricultural commodities arising from the linkage between mandis and eNAM platform.
Earlier, farmers had no choice but to go by the diktats of middlemen or take back their produce home if the prices did not match their expectations, she said.
“After the introduction of smartphones, things have changed. If a buyer quotes a low price, farmers tell them what they are seeing on the Internet and refuse to accept the low prices offered by buyers. This is also helping farmers to avoid being given a price that is lower than the minimum support price (MSP) for some crops,” said Manogna.
Two concerns
Farmers have two concerns. One is that they are not getting the price they want for the commodity, even if they supply superior-quality produce.
Manogna said her team’s study was to ensure farmers could access the direct route and eliminate middlemen in the system. Though the Government’s objective in introducing eNAM was this, it has taken time to yield the desired results.
At least 60-70 per cent of the middlemen have been eliminated, as once a farmer registers for eNAM, he gets a message directly on his smartphone. The integration has also helped in creating a standard procedure for the quality of the agri produce that farmers bring, she said.
Initially, eNAM was not operational in all places, but over the past five years, there have been a lot of improvements.
Over 40 questions
The BITS Goa professor and her team have submitted a draft report to Nabard and are waiting to finalise the report, which looked into how intergation with eNAM would help farmers. The team looked into the price realisation of 23 commodities and came up with over 40 questions during the survey of farmers in the western coastal region.
Manogna, who has been looking into forecasting of agricultural commodity prices by evaluating traditional stochastic models, machine learning techniques and deep learning approaches in 23 commodities using daily wholesale price data over the past 15 years, said more financial products have come out of agricultural commodities.
However, prices are not behaving according to supply and demand fundamentals. A lot of interventions are happening on the government’s policy side. This has resulted in the farmer or the customer not getting full benefits, she said.
Agricultural markets are functioning well after the introduction of eNAM. However, initiatives such as machine learning help in forecasting prices better, said Manogna.
Ground-level variables
“We have some standard econometric models in place already, specific to the statistical models. But, we did see that these new machine learning and AI algorithms were performing much better in terms of error or accuracy or in terms of predicting, capturing the seasonality, capturing the climate change and the soil,” she said.
The BITS Goa professor and her team have recently got a paper published on using hybrid model to forecast prices. “We are now looking into more ground-level variables such as climate, soil, and trade tariffs,” she said.
The team got into machine learning and algorithms in specific neural networks. “In our research, I found that recurring neural networks were performing better than artificial neural networks in prediction (of prices). The last 10-15 years data was divided into testing and training in 70:30 ratio,” she said.
The team is now including all variable, including climate change, for better prediction of prices. “Climate change is definitely having an impact on prices. We have to make sure that we are coming up with solution, which is climate-resilient agricultural productivity,” said Manogna.
Published on April 24, 2025
