Special

e-Krishi: Online Agri-market

e-Krishi is a market-driven agricultural initiative through IT enabled agribusiness centres in Kerala to address the existing gap in agriculture information flow and transaction management. The project envisages facilitating and enabling farmers and other stakeholders through agribusiness centres to interact with service providers in the private, government and non-government sectors.

The project looks at establishing a robust IT enabled platform where members can seek information, transact and make or receive electronic payments. It will aggregate a  responsive farmer community of about 100,000 with cumulative farmland of 100,000 hectares, enrol input providers and reduce the influence of middlemen in the sale of agricultural produce.

PROCESS->

In order to aggregate small quantity of marketable surplus available with farmers, they were encouraged to post whatever little quantity available with them in the e-Krishi website.
A virtual aggregation module of the products up to panchayat level was developed and the information was made available to the traders so they could lift bulk quantity from a specified locality. A forward posting module was developed so that the farmers could post the yield and the businessmen their requirements well in advance so that both could plan in advance to strike a deal. A toll free call centre is in operation to help farmers, traders and others involved. An e-Krishi centre was opened within 3 km of every farmhouse in the district.

IMPACT ->

The project has helped realise better income for the farmers due to aggregation of the commodities. Ball copra which used to be sold at Rs 8 per piece was sold at Rs 10 per piece when a major buyer wanted a big consignment. The project has also led to better exposure of the produce, Cassava setts when posted on the site were purchased by a buyer from Nagaland. There are currently 145 e-Krishi centres in operation and 95 Bhoomi clubs (organisation of progressive farmers) have been formed covering all panchayats. More than 7,500 farmers have posted their commodities in the portal for selling. Trade worth more than Rs 1 million has been carried out and as many as 177 export traders and 132 institutional buyers have been brought under e-Krishi. The project has been extended to other districts as well.

SCALABILITY ->

The system is scalable to the expected volume of data for the purpose that it is intended. There is no limitation on client access licenses and concurrent usage, The project in the present form is successful mainly because it is being piggy-backed on the existing Akshaya Centres. More activities can be incorporated with the existing platform and it can be scaled up. The project can be replicated in other states.