The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare has come up with a unique online initiative known as Jaivik Kheti. The aim of this new initiative is to promote as well as facilitate organic farming and its purchase.
Organic farmers can directly get in touch with the buyers to sell their produce by simply registering on www.jaivikkheti.in and the latter can avail of the best prices that are lower as compared to the market rates.
Jaivik Kheti, a portal launched by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Department of Agriculture (DAC) together with MSTC, is an e-commerce and a knowledge platform. The knowledge repository section of the website includes case studies, videos, and best farming practices, success stories and other material related to organic cultivation to facilitate and promote organic farming.
Why Jaivik Kheti?
The e-commerce section offers the whole bouquet of organic products ranging from pulses, grains, fruits and vegetables. Buyers can now get organic products at their doorstep through the website at much lower prices as compared to market rates.
Due to its reach, Jaivik Kheti will be able to link various stakeholders, like regional councils, local groups, individual farmers, buyers, government agencies and input suppliers for the all-inclusive development as well as promotion of organic cultivation. Through this portal, the Government provides various price discovery mechanisms to help farmers get the better prices for their products via forward auction, price-quantity bidding, book building & reverse auction mechanisms.
This is a much-needed push as organic cultivation is still in a nascent stage in India despite the fact that Organic Farming Policy was introduced in 2005. Fifteen years down the line, organic farming constitutes just 2 percent (2.78 million hectare of farmland) of net sown area in the country under organic cultivation (as of March 2020, according to the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare).
Ironically, though India has a very small organic area under cultivation, it is ranked first in terms of the number of organic farmers, with over 1.9 million farmers as of March 2020, which is 1.3% of 146 million agricultural landholders.
