NEW DELHI: Indian farmers have been turning to tech-enabled platforms to sell produce like never before as the covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown has traditional agriculture physical markets.
“We have seen farmers coming to our platform in bulk as an alternative supply chain is not available for product pickup,” said Atul Kumar, co-founder and chief executive of FreshVnF, the company that runs Fraazo. The platform has seen a three times surge in customers and has hence had to reach out to more farmers.
Two other startups, AgriBazaar and Agri10x, said they’ve seen similar trends. While AgriBazaar saw 400% increase in registrations on its app in April, Pankajj Ghode, chief executive of Agri10x, said the the platform has acquired 1.5 lakh new farmers since March, in contrast to the six month it took to acquire 1 lakh farmers before the pandemic.
Fraazo, Agri10x and AgriBazaar help farmers avoid middlemen and reach customers. This includes individuals, hotels, restaurants and other places where farmers can sell their produce.
This trend is expected to gain momentum with the government’s announcement of a ₹1 lakh crore fund for farm gate infrastructure. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the same as part of the government’s ₹20 lakh crore economic stimulus package.
“The stimulus package’s framework gives a push for e-trading of agriculture produce, it will ensure that an agri-tech startup like AgriBazaar benefits from the move,” said Amith Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, AgriBazaar. “From an industry perspective, it will attract serious players like large Indian corporations and investments into the sector, and give current players opportunities for scale and better sector recognition.”
According to Fraazo’s Kumar, Indian farmers have perishable value chains and get less than 30% of retail price, unlike developed countries where farmers get up to 70%. This occurs due to lack of storage infrastructure at farm gate and unavailability of cold-supply chain, which many agri-tech companies provide. Stakeholders believe that the government’s package will put money in the hands of farmers and let them take advantage of their solutions.
“Steps announced by the FM will also be very helpful in handing over more income to farmers by reducing their dependency on first-mile buyers,” he added. The reforms announced could help lower income farmers, who don’t necessarily benefit from current schemes from the government.
The pandemic has led to a lot of sabzi mandis (vegetable wholesale markets) across the country to shut down, or raised fears among vegetable sellers that they will help spread the virus.
For instance, vegetable mandis in Eintkhedi and Ratibad in Bhopal had been shut down by the state administration earlier, after a wholesaler had been found to be covid-positive. The Gazipur fruit and vegetable market in East Delhi had also been shut down for two days on May 15, after two Agricultural Produce Market Committee officials tested positive for the disease.
