Bringing perishable agricultural commodities on unified market platform (UMP)

Abstract

The bidding process between Commission Agents and Traders for perishables at APMC is very opaque currently. In the present system, it is observed that the farmers bring the produce from their farms to the APMC yard and the details of the produce such as the weight of the produce, commodity carried in are noted down while issuing the gate pass. The weight is an approximation arrived at by multiplying the number of crates with the approximate weight of each crate. After this, the farmer unloads the crates at his preferred commission agent. Here, each farmer’s produce is kept separately in lots and tagged. After tagging, the commission agent hires manual labour to sort and grade the produce. This is performed manually without any scientific procedure and no information about the grading is codified and is highly subject to the specific worker, commission agent and his buyers. It is to be noted that the farmers bring their produce the day before usually around midnight to dawn. Each commission agent will hire the services of an auctioneer whose job is to shout out the quoted rates by the interested buyers. Usually, the auctioneer starts by standing near a lot and starts with a base rate set by the commission agent. The buyers will begin to crowd around the auctioneer and try to outsmart each other by quoting higher rates. The auctioneer typically waits for around 7~10 seconds before closing the auction of a lot. Then he moves on to the next lot. This happens until the all the lots are finished. If, in case, the produce is not sold or the buyers aren’t interested, the lot is either stored for the next day’s auction or sold just to meet the cost. (In case of tomatoes, the overripe ones are segregated and sold to buyers who need it for immediate consumption requirements such as restaurants, etc.) The buyers are mostly wholesale retailers who on behalf of some big retailers like super markets, hyper markets, retailers who have multiple franchises in the city or else they might represent a consortium of small retailers like kirana stores, etc.