The Agro Enterprise Centre under the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) has launched an agricultural market-related Android application named Krishi Udhyam Bazar.

The app is a virtual platform which brings together vendors and buyers of farm products and is intended to resolve issues related to price fixing.

Agriculture Development Minister Gauri Shankar Chaudhary released the mobile app amid a ceremony held in the Capital on Wednesday. “The application is an innovative tool and an experiment to resolve issues related to black marketeering and price fixing of agricultural products,” said Chaudhary. “However, issues like web connectivity, effective dissemination of information and difficulties in market management pose a question over the effective implementation and sustainability of the mobile application.”

Krishi Udhyam Bazar has two modules—Buy-Sell and Market Price. The Buy-Sell module operates under the popular business model followed by online Nepali marketplaces like Nepal Best Deals and Kaymu.

Farmers can use the app to screen their products and fix a price and vendors can connect with them to make a bid. Moreover, the application will maintain a database of buyers and sellers of each product making it easier to search business options.

The Market Price module will disseminate price information collected by the centre from 40 major agricultural markets around Nepal. It will help sellers to select and position their products in the markets offering good pricing options. Likewise, statistical charts in this module can help people to get a view of price trends of farm products.

“With the help of this application, farmers can get fair

returns for their products,” said Pashupati Murarka, president of the FNCCI, “Moreover, the application will prove beneficial to those who require market information regularly.”  

The application is currently available for the Android platform, said Neptouch, the software developer. “The centre will try to launch the mobile application for other platforms too,” it said in a statement. “Likewise, additional features like Agricultural Production, Challenges and Solutions, Agricultural Raw Materials, Agricultural Training, Agriculture Network, Agriculture Calendar and Climate and Weather Information will be added to make it a fine agriculture app.”

The operating manual of the application is available at www.agripricenepal.com. The application intends to provide price updates on agricultural products like fruits, vegetables, meat items, milk and milk products, spices, pulses, oils, edibles, herbs and other daily essentials. The market and product codes are available on the centre’s website.

Government officials present at the ceremony said that the previous SMS-based enquiry system could not perform as per expectations because of a digital divide among farmers and authorities. They said that the application, although innovative, might not be sustainable because of low awareness among the farmer community.

The mobile application was built under the Asian Development Bank-funded Raising Incomes of Small and Medium Farmers Project currently overseen by the Ministry of Agricultural Development.