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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | How Maharashtra is changing the way farmers sell their produce -Abhiram Ghadyalpatil

How Maharashtra is changing the way farmers sell their produce -Abhiram Ghadyalpatil

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published Published on Oct 19, 2016   modified Modified on Oct 19, 2016
-Livemint.com

Maharashtra’s farmer-to-consumer markets and APMC reforms are changing the state’s agriculture sector, long-burdened by economic and political pressures

Mumbai:
These days, Lata Arun Dimble is out at 8am in her farm in Khed Shivapur. Along with husband Arun and son Ajit, she picks brinjal, tomato, chilly, cucumber, spinach, radish, bitter gourd, cabbage, cauliflower, and green peas. By 11am, the vegetables are loaded onto a mini-truck her husband owns.

It’s the same story at neighbouring farms in Khed Shivapur affiliated to Kanifnath Shetkari Bachat Gat, a farmers’ group. Fruits including pomegranate, guava and banana are also loaded on to vehicles. Around 1pm, a small convoy of four-five mini-trucks with vegetables and fruits grown by 15 members of the group starts for Pune, Maharashtra’s second largest city which is 25km away.

Forty minutes later, the trucks empty their contents at Shetkari Grahak Athavadi Bazaar (farmer-consumer weekly market) off Pune’s Sinhagad road. The farmers spread their fresh produce at the stalls put up by farmers’ groups themselves, farm produce companies or farm produce cooperatives. In 15 minutes, Dimble gets her first customer.

From the farm to the customer, all it took was six hours.

Dimble’s group is one of the 60 such groups enrolled with Pune-based Shri Swami Samarth Shetkari Utpadak Company, registered with the Registrar of Companies. Narendra Pawar, one of its directors and a farm activist himself who has spiritedly piloted the deregulated farmer-consumer markets, says this change was long overdue. One of the 800-plus such companies operating in Maharashtra, Pawar’s Shri Swami Samarth is connected to around 2,200 farmers through 60 groups.

The Maharashtra State Agriculture Marketing Board (MSAMB) operates 31 such farmers markets in the state involving farmers’ cooperatives, farm producers’ organizations (FPOs), farmers’ self-help groups (SHGs) and farm produce companies. Out of these 31 markets, 25 are in Pune. According to Bhaskar Patil, a senior assistant manager at MSAMB, there are plans to open 100 such markets across the state.

A government agency, MSAMB also supervises the functioning of Maharashtra’s APMC (agriculture produce marketing committee) markets constituted under the APMC (Regulation) Act of 1963. “Except milk and sugar cane, APMC markets in the state are licensed to carry out transactions in all farm commodities,” Patil says. “But it is not mandatory on farmers to bring their produce to APMC markets only. The legal provision is that buyers licensed by Maharashtra’s directorate of agriculture marketing can purchase farm produce from farmers.”

Maharashtra has 305 principal and 603 secondary APMC market yards. The APMC Act mandates that these markets must have facilities like auction halls, warehouses, weigh bridges, shops for retailers, police station, post office, bore-wells, farmer amenity centres and a soil-testing laboratory.

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Livemint.com, 18 October, 2016, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/kejX5POEUKK1l7qz05c0VL/How-Maharashtra-is-changing-the-way-farmers-sell-their-produ.html


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