Govt to review e-NAM, soil health card schemes tomorrow

The Centre has called a meeting of state agriculture ministers tomorrow to review the progress made in integrating mandis with the electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) and issuance of soil health cards to farmers.
As per official data, 455 mandis in 13 states have been integrated with the national web-based portal of e-NAM, which was launched in April 2016, with the registration of over 47 lakh farmers and 91,000 traders. The target is to connect 585 mandis with e-NAM by March 31, 2018.
Against the target of 14 crores, 9 crore soil health cards have been distributed to farmers across the country. This scheme was unveiled in February 2015.

"The review meeting will enable central and state governments to jointly address issues to take these programs forward thereby contributing to enhancing farmers income," the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
The review meeting will be held tomorrow at Krishi Bhawan here. Agri-marketing ministers of 13 states, mandis of which have been connected to e-NAM, and state agriculture ministers along with senior officers will be present.
In the meeting, the new model Agriculture Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2017 will also be discussed to encourage the states to adopt the suggested provisions at the earliest to bring in the benefits for the farmers, the statement added.

The e-NAM model aims at revolutionising agri markets by ensuring better price discovery, bringing in transparency and competition to enable farmers to get improved remuneration for their produce moving towards 'One Nation, One Market'.
On the other hand, the Soil Health Card scheme is helping the farmers to know the nutrition status of their land and receiving advisory for rationalisation of inputs, thereby reducing costs and increasing returns through appropriate cropping patterns, it added.