The following are the functions of AP MARKFED:
·
Supply
of inputs like Fertilizers, Micronutrients etc.
·
Undertaking
price support operations
· Acting as an agent to the Govt for procurement, supply and distribution of Agri-commodities and also acting as the nodal agency for supply of inputs
·
Warehousing
of Agri-commodities
·
Undertaking
commercial operations of Agricultural Produce
·
Owning
and operating Agro-based industries as part of value addition
AP MARKFED is the nodal agency for procurement of
agricultural produce at Minimum Support Price (MSP). With the objective of
supporting farmers to secure better prices for their produce by providing
marketing linkages, AP MARKFED procures Agricultural Commodities through its
member societies at MSP (or remunerative prices, as the case maybe). With
reference to the same, AP MARKFED procures various commodities such as: red
gram, Bengal gram, green gram, maize, jowar, turmeric, onion, banana, sweet
orange, tomato, tobacco, groundnut, etc. For the present Financial year
2020-21, AP MARKFED has procured stock worth INR 1,800 crores through its
procurement centers located in more than 1,000 places on the instructions of
Government of Andhra Pradesh and is acting as a sub agent to NAFED by procuring
and storing agricultural stock worth 1,500 crores.
The
Process of Procurement:
· Prices
at village level (Rythu Bharosa Kendra or RBK) are continuously monitored by
village assistants and fed into the CMAPP portal. Senior officials at AP
MARKFED get summarized reports from CMAPP and decide on the requirement of
interventions.
· Once interventions
are decided, Village Assistants (VAAs) begin the process of farmer
registration.
· Procurement
centers are of 2 types: Primary and Secondary. Secondary Centers are mapped to
Primary Centers. Secondary Centers are smaller centers, which are in remote
areas and where procurement volumes are lower. Primary centers regulate
purchase and the flow of material from secondary centers.
· Warehouses
are identified in each district and all Village Level Centers are mapped to
these warehouses.
· Once a
farmer reaches a purchase point or RBK, the quality of their material is
verified by a MARKFED agent and if it meets FAQ parameters, it is accepted.
· Once the
quantity of material reaches the threshold level, it is transported to the
mapped warehouse. Quality of material and quantity is again cross checked at
the warehouse, before the material is accepted at the warehouse.
· The
entire process is captured by CMAPP. However, quality assessment is manual as
per defined guideline but subjective.
· The
material received at the warehouses is stored until market rates are conducive
for sale or till start of next season. A committee comprising of senior
officials decides the opportune time for selling the stored materials.
· Stored
materials are auctioned off through an e-auction process, where interested
entities can participate nationally. In the current process, commodities are
liquidated on “as-is-where-is” basis, which means, no deductions on account of
quality is entertained and the successful bidder needs to lift materials from
the specified warehouse.
Way Forward: In the past one year, AP MARKFED has undergone a digital
transformation. Many manual processes have been digitalized. However, the
organization wants to further improve the procurement process by utilizing
emerging technologies.
Few observable gaps are:
· There is lot of information collected at
various sources in the procurement process, but the data is not processed to
arrive at actionable insights.
· Lack of
scientific storage infrastructure at village level may lead to higher damage or
insect infestation
· Once
material reaches common warehouses, traceability in the portal is lost as the
system only records total inventory at a location
· Assaying
protocols/ SOPs can further be improved to increase awareness of all FAQ parameters
· The
subjective nature of quality assessment can be improved by using technology
· Technology
can help in reducing the number of instruments required to measure parameters
such as Foreign Matter and Damage
In order to improve its processes further, AP MARKFED is
looking for entities who can provide solutions to the aforementioned issues
utilizing emerging tech. To establish better traceability, AP MARKFED is
planning to use QR codes for capturing large number of information in real-time
and supporting decision making.
Since QR code scanning facilitates collection of data at
each node, it is necessary to integrate QR code scan data with CMAPP (Kindly
refer to the Annexure II for more information on CMAPP and it’s functions,
Annexure III for the database tables available in the CMAPP) and with various
information systems of supply chain partners in order to get a meaningful data.
The organization expects that with the integration of CMAPP and QR Code, any
drawback (e.g. material shortages, improper assaying) can be traced back to
origin and corrective action can be taken if necessary.
Additionally, AP MARKFED intends to use Computer Vision
and AI to digitalize the assaying process to make it more objective and
increase the granularity of data captured at the village level. This will
greatly enhance the quality of assessment and increase systemic control on the
procurement activities.
a.
Problem Statement
|
#
|
Problem
Statement
|
Description
|
Example
1
|
Example
2
|
|
1
|
How to process the Big data available
in CMAPP in a better way and how could that be projected, to generate significant
business insights?
|
Currently,
the data in CMAPP is projected and available as per the database tables in
Annexure III. These different tables should be simultaneously processed to
generate useful business insights, for AP MARKFED
|
To make use of the geo coordinates
of the warehouses, RBK and procurement centres, the transport system and the
simple and efficient routes can be generated automatically.
|
Suggestions to sell crops from one
district to another, based on the local market price, distance between the
districts, corresponding transport charge and other costs incurred
|
|
2
|
How to achieve AI based Crop Assessments
(assaying protocols) through image capture,
that are not dependent on instruments – thereby emphasizing on all the
quality parameters not just FAQ (Fair Average Quality) and capture them
accurately with mobility
|
Current
assaying procedures captures inaccurate values as the procedure is totally
dependent on human interventions. The
digital instrument to be used, should capture highly precise images of the
crop from all the dimensions, to capture all the necessary physical
parameters to evaluate the quality and to confirm if the crop adheres to the
FAQ conditions.
|
Detection and estimation of
moisture content/ percentage of broken crops in the sample – which was photo
captured, and further assigning their quality grades them based on the
captured moisture content
|
Enabling
sensors and satellite photos to 1. Capture crop level data in each farmland,
2. Planning the procurement based on the plantation, timely updates and final
harvest data – at farmer level, 3. Advanced planning till the day level
scheduling at farmer level, based on the captured data
|
|
3
|
Use of Natural Language
Processing to categorize and automatically respond
|
Any
queries raised by the users of CMAPP, should be received in the native
language (Telugu) and should be naturally processed and categorized, for
automatic response
|
A farmer raising a query related to their payments, should
be immediately processed and categorized under payments section. Also, they
should be responded back in their native language, at the earliest
|
A warehouse manager raising a query
related to their payment, to be processed and categorized under Warehouse
module, and to be responded back in their native language, at the earliest.
|
|
4
|
How to enable Geo tagging or fencing
the warehouses, procurement centres and RBKs –
for the ease of control, better mapping and management
|
Currently,
the warehouses are not geo tagged or fenced, which makes the decision making
regarding the storage of procured crops, a time-consuming manual process
|
To tag all the warehouses, RBK and
procurement centres with their geo coordinates, so that they could be used to
generate simple and most effective routes, for transport and storage.
|
The buyers (from the e-auction
platforms) could be rightly directed and scheduled for free lifting of the
stocks, using the location details of buyer and warehouses.
|
Single
point of contact for queries – Kishore, AP MARKFED (8341768954)
Stages of Innovation Challenge
·
Step 1: Registration with company profile
· Step 2: Induction Session from
AP MARKFED on use cases and Q&A.
· Step 3: Review session with
Panel. First round of screening based on the concept and details submitted along
with innovation in thought.
· Step 4: Submission of detailed
implementation plan with costing of complete rollout by shortlisted startups.
· Step 5: Presentation of top 3-5
startups per use case to Jury.
· Step 6: Selection of top 2
startups per use case for pilot implementation (APMARKFED may reject all
solutions if they do not see the value)
· Step 7: Pilot deployment by
selected startups and technical validation.
· Step 8: Evaluation of pilot
results by the jury and selection of 1 final winner per use case.
· Step 9:Award ceremony to the
final winners
