A year after announcing the plan to set up 22,000 rural markets, connecting them with nearest APMCs and e-NAM platform, the Cabinet on Wednesday approved a `2,000 crore fund — Agri-Market Infrastructure Fund — with Nabard. The rural markets, to be named as GrAMs (Gramin Agricultural Markets), will be eligible to avail loan from this fund at cheaper interest rates for creation of necessary facilities in the market complex.
The Agri-Market Infrastructure Fund was announced in 2018 Budget for developing and upgrading agricultural marketing infrastructure in the 22,000 GrAMs and 585 APMCs. About 200 GrAMs are currently under construction from MNREGA fund and the rural development ministry has been discussing with states to scale up the number of these markets, sources said. The guidelines for GrAMs were issued in December last year after detailed consultation with states and other concerned ministries.
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States have been given choice of appointing a nodal department to oversee the functioning of these GrAMs as there are many agencies involved in the ground and their administrative departments vary from state to state. “Agriculture marketing is under cooperation department in many states which do not have control over panchayats or blocks. Most of these existing rural haats, which are to be rechristened as GrAMs with modern infrastructure and latest technology, are under the control of panchayats or village committees. Since rural development ministry has been implementing MNREGA and there is provision for building necessary infrastructure for market from this fund, the Centre has decided to utilise the money for setting up GrAMs,” a government official said. From the MNREGA fund, 40% is used for buying materials and 60% for wage payments in the construction work.
Initially, many states had sought these rural markets to be set up in new places which was not accepted as the concept was to see improvement in the existing market, the official said. Every complex will have provision for allowing space for small processing units like rice huller plant, small cold store, etc.
Announcing the development and upgradation of existing 22,000 rural haats into GrAMs, Union minister A run Jaitley had said that more than 86% of farmers in India are small and marginal who are not always in a position to directly transact at APMCs and other wholesale markets.