Telangana mulls to scale up eNAM connectivity of AMCs

Hyderabad: The Government of Telangana State is mulling to scale up the connectivity of the existing Agriculture Market Committees (AMCs) to the Electronic National Agriculture Market (eNAM) for the benefit of the farmers in the State.

According to the State Agriculture Department, initially, only five AMCs were connected to the eNAM on a pilot basis and then 10 more were added. The initiative was received positively from the farmers despite some objections from the private players.

This has made Telangana scale up the electronic connectivity of the AMCs with the eNAM to 58. Now the State government wants to scale up further as it has the potential to connect and transact commodities connecting as many as 100 AMCs in the State to the eNAM.

The decision of the state government comes against the backdrop of the recent announcement of the Centre to onboard 1,000 more AMCs across the country on the eNAM platform.

Currently, the State has about 192 AMCs, including some of them operating like sub-markets. The AMCs are transacting the commodities trade in about 125 items. The products include agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry like grains, pulses, cattle, vegetables and fruits.

The 58 markets in the state are mainly dealing with non-perishable commodities like paddy, grains and groundnut, said Telangana Marketing Department Director G Lakshmibai.

She said that the State has the potential to scale up the AMCs with the eNAM connectivity as the State government's focus was to make agriculture profitable in Telangana. This would be done once the guidelines and directions related to their implementation are received by the State.

It is also felt that other commodities like amchur, black gram, dry chillies, cotton, paddy, maize, Telangana Sona variety superfine rice with proper branding would further help them to sell through the eNAM to fetch better price for their agriculture produce.

Meanwhile, the State Agriculture Department said they have already tied up with the Indian School of Business (ISB) for branding and marketing Telangana Sona Rice.