The growing popularity of the commodities exchanges is one of the major factors to be taken into account. Even so many changes are under way in Indian agriculture sector. The existing agricultural marketing infrastructure has been exposed as being inadequate for today's needs. There is just one traditional agricultural market yard in an area as vast as 435Sq.Km. where most transactions are done by local influencers, who usually keep farmers and rural traders in the dark about how their commodity is evaluated and priced. This vacuum needs to be viewed in the context of the other changes taking place with regard to the marketing of agro commodities.
To address all these issues, we at Bahuvida Limited aims to improve farmers and rural traders access to markets by building modern rural agricultural warehouses called “Private Mandi” at village level with sophisticated marketing infrastructure for agri produces across the country. It means establishing semi-online trading platform and modern rural wholesale markets that are effective, professionally managed and responsive to farmers and rural trader's needs. With its first-of-its-kind Private Mandi's concept Bahuvida aims to create 88 agri trade centers in 18 different Indian states (which covers 549 districts) plan to serve yearly more than 1 million farmers by getting licenses from respective APMC's which are going to be act as “One Stop Shop” for farmers, traders and end-buyers. The 18 states are: Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. Bahuvida have already identified the sites for such private mandi's and also short-listed the financial institutions/investors which will support these ventures.
These Private Mandi's will provide farmers and rural traders a more competitive and therefore efficient modern marketing mechanism including necessary logistics support, a transparent digital price-discovery network that helps farmers and rural traders get higher rates for their agri commodity transparently with minimum support price guarantee on the spot - in sharp contrast to the present system. This move, may translate into the last leg of privatization of the entire Indian agri commodity value chain, could see end-buyers and corporate retail players literally buy from the real farmers or rural traders across the country through this Private Mandi's.