Govt's scheme for FPOs/FPCs catches eye of KPMG, EY, and Grant Thornton

The NPMA will provide project guidance, data maintenance, and monitoring to the 10,000-odd FPCs.

Global consultancy firms KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY), and Grant Thornton are among the big names that have shown an interest in acting as project managers to the Centre’s scheme to form 10,000 farmer-producer organisations (FPOs)/farmer-producer companies (FPCs) in the next few years.

Officials said the firms had submitted their bids to form the National Project Management Agency (NPMA) for the FPO/FPC programme. The NPMA will provide project guidance, data maintenance, and monitoring to the 10,000-odd FPOs/FPCs.

That apart, the agency will also a provide supportive and broad-based ecosystem to form new FPOs/FPCs and also lend support to them for five years in all aspects of management: Inputs, production, processing, value addition, market linkages, credit and bank linkages, use of technology, etc.

The NPMA will be appointed by the Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), which is one of agencies identified by the government to form the FPOs/FPCs, along with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) and National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC).

“The NPMA will act as project management authority or a project management unit and it will be disbanded as soon as the job assigned to it is over,” a senior official said.

According to guidelines issued by the government, an FPO or FPC must have at least 300 members. At present the country has over 6,000 registered FPOs/FPCs, of which nearly 4,300 have been promoted in the past few years.

Sources said of these several were in the phase of mobilisation, equity collection, business planning, etc. 

The government has sanctioned Rs 6,868 crore for the scheme. That apart, it has cleared a credit guarantee fund of Rs 1,000 crore to be created in Nabard for farmer-producer organisations, and another Rs 500 crore in the NCDC.

While the NPMA is being designed as a bigger project management agency, it will also provide advisory services for selecting and monitoring cluster-based business organisations (CBBOs).

CBBOs will play the role performed by resource institutes (RIs) in the field, but with greater professional expertise and a cluster approach to develop region-specific products. 

They could be business support organisations, trusts, societies, companies, foundations, corporate social responsibility cells, reputed NGOs, individual or federated successful FPOs, ICAR (Indian Council for Agricultural Research) institutions like Krishi Vigyan Kendras, etc.

RIs are the first-line of support for farmer-producer organisations in filing returns, accessing markets, clearing regulatory hurdles, and daily paperwork. 

Most of them are well-established social organisations and NGOs.