Assessment of the impact of e-mandi on marketing efficiency

Abstract

Agriculture sector is an intricate part of Indian economy. The contribution to GDP is about 17 per cent in 2017-18 and employment to over 54.6 per cent of the population. electronic National Agriculture Market (NAM) is a platform on India electronic trading gateway which arranges the current Agricultural Marketing Produce Committee (APMC) mandis to make a unified national market for agricultural products. In e-NAM produce can be sold directly at a national platform with higher producer’s share in consumer’s rupee. Lesser the involvement of middlemen higher is the marketing efficiency. APMC Varanasi is one of the largest Pahariya e-mandi in Uttar Pradesh was selected purposively. This study analyzed the marketing efficiency of tomato, lady finger, ridge gourd and brinjal and found that marketing efficiency was higher for all the studies crops when sold through e-NAM. It is concluded that the analysis of marketing efficiency for the above vegetables crops shows that the implementation of e-NAM has improved the marketing efficiency. This is due to fact that the role of middlemen has been reduced significantly by selling produce through e-NAM system.