A study of quality and price relation for agriculture commodity

Abstract

Rastriya e-Marketing services was started to provide a platform to the farmers and traders with an aim to bring transparency in the process of agricultural commodity trading in the APMC market by effectively employing online platform. It got success in bringing the transparency and providing better remuneration to the farmers. It has removed the inefficiencies of conventional APMC system to a large extent. ReMS became a role model for other states. The platform is still in its initial phase and going through many incremental changes to remove its shortcomings. In this regards, the quality of commodity is one of the major factors which helps in determining the prices offered for different lots. ReMS is assaying 25% of the lots every day for few commodities in around 40 APMC markets. In addition to that, traders are also evaluating the quality of commodity by physical assessment. In our study, we found that there is no relation between the prices offered by traders and quality parameters that are currently recorded by ReMS. With our qualitative and quantitative analysis we have observed that there is a gap between the perceived quality parameters by traders and parameters considered by ReMS which are in accordance with Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). Hence, so far assaying of the commodity did not bring desired impact. Therefore, this could be an opportunity to improve the quality assessment of the agriculture commodity that will help in encouraging quality based bidding with the quality parameters data provided by ReMS. Hence, there is a need to collect the additional quality parameters over and above BIS sandards, with consistent format and better accuracy. Final quality parameters have some room for improvement. Hence, it requires some incremental changes to make all stakeholders to consider quality parameters and trust them which are provided on ReMS platform.