For Clean, Smart and Profitable Farming.
Agriculture Apps
India farmers have had little freedom in buyers and choosing markets for their produce for
many years.
In the country all states except some things like retail markets where middlemen squeeze farmers to
increase margins and mandate that marketing and selling of farm produce must be routed through
state-owned mandis.
Technology-enabled solutions help out Indian farmers to sell their produce directly to customers in
such a situation. Edvin Varghese working to develop computing components at IBM India, to take a
break from his corporate world and develop, along with others, an app called Mandi Trades.
When a farmer registers on Mandi Trades, it takes information of farmer's produce, along with location
details, and stores it on a scalable cloud-based database. For a buyer, this application gives a map-
based view of available produce with the produce info, sorted by his geographical proximity to the
farmer. It’s as easy as a breeze to contact farmers, as his phone number is available on the app.
It includes viewing the current prices of commodities in trade, demand for listed products, weather and
seasonal changes and prices of rare items, so that farmers plan better. The app has about 10,000
registered users, launched two years ago by Farmmobi Technologies, with an investment of Rs.20
lakh each by Edvin and his friend Murthy Gurunathan.
After one year the launch, the makers realised it cannot put out the content only in English if it
means business. In version 2.0, they made the app the available in five other languages such as Hindi,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
Mandi Trades, says the company, has been short-listed for the m-Billionth award and has enabled about
Rs.50 crore worth of trade until now. Varghese said “The solution we have developed is a convergence
of four disruptive technologies—social, mobile, analytics and cloud. Anybody in the supply chain can
use it. The only thing that we didn’t enable is payment, as the laws do not allow that.”