All states in the country it is mandate that marketing and selling of farm product must be done through
state-owned mandis, retail markets where middlemen squeeze farmers to increase margins.
Edvin Varghese, who was working to develop computing components at IBM India, to take a break from his corporate
world and develop an app called Mandi Trades.
When a farmer registers on Mandi Trades, it takes information of his produce, along with location details, and stores
it on a scalable cloud-based database. For a buyer, it 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.
There are also options to help farmers plan better, such as viewing the current prices of commodities in trade,
demand for listed products, weather and seasonal changes and prices of rare items.
Launched by Farmmobi Technologies, with an investment of Rs.20 lakh each by Edvin and his friend Murthy Gurunathan.
The app has about 10,000 registered users.So in version 2.0 the app is available in five other languages: Hindi,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.