Agribusiness & Food Processing

India's agricultural market architecture has been predominantly governed at the state level under individual Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Acts, creating a structurally fragmented ecosystem of approximately 7,690 regulated mandis — significantly below the National Commission on Farmers' recommendation of 42,000 mandis, or one per 80 square kilometers of arable land. Within this framework, traders also required state-specific licences, market fees are levied at multiple points of transaction, and farmers are legally bound to sell within designated market areas. In Punjab, for instance, cumulative mandi levies on a transaction can exceed 8.5% of the transaction value.

For decades, India’s agricultural narrative has been defined by a jarring paradox: record-breaking harvests shadowed by staggering post-harvest losses. While the Green Revolution effectively dismantled the production crisis, the preservation crisis has remained a persistent Achilles' heel for the world's most populous nation. Today, however, a profound systemic shift is gradually taking root. With the strategic rollout of the World’s Largest Grain Storage Plan in the Cooperative Sector, the Union Ministry of Cooperation is executing a sophisticated fiscal and logistical manoeuvre by pivoting away from massive, centralized silos in favour of a hyper-local, decentralized network of Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS).

The financial year 2026-27 budget allocation for the development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in agriculture indicates the government’s intention to keep up with the global trends in agriculture and commitment to innovating in a technology-driven era of farming.