E-commerce Portal for Organic Produce

 “We will launch a dedicated e-commerce poal to enhance the availability of organic produce to the doorsteps of consumers. ” — Promise in 2019 BJP Manifesto

An evaluation of the research information below indicates that:
1. Question No. 1710 (Unstarred) , Lok Sabha 17, Session 1, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, June 2, 2019, Government has launched a www.jaivikkheti.in portal acting both as a knowledge as well as marketing platform. Details of farmers involved in Organic farming, input suppliers, certification agencies (PGS) and marketing agencies are available for smooth implementation from production to marketing. PKVY/PGS groups can take the advantage of this portal for capacity building, technical know-how, communicating with marketing channels/ other groups and direct marketing of their produce to prospective buyers and consumers.

2. Question No. 4586 (Unstarred), Lok Sabha 17, Session 11, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, March 28, 2023, Government has developed web portal- www.Jaivikkheti.in/ as an online marketing platform for direct sale of organic products by farmers to the consumers to help them for better price realization. 6.09 lakh farmers have been registered under Jaivik kheti portal.

3. A meticulous survey of the portal however reveals some startling facts. While it is incontrovertible that the portal indeed does exist (https://www.jaivikkheti.in/shop) and has been create for this purpose (it is ostensibly a e-commerce site with ‘add to cart’ options etc.), there are, alarmingly, in the ‘e-bazaar’ (i.e. the e-commerce functionality of the portal) section, currently only 2.0 products (tomato and potato) being sold by exactly 1.0 farmers/sellers on the portal. Screenshot attached:

4. To cross-verify whether the above alarming status of the ‘e-bazaar’ observed during the site survey was an anomaly or a stable, confirmed attribute of the portal’s essentially defunct utility as an e-commerce platform, the website-usage data was searched. This data was not available in the public domain not through an exhaustive scanning of the Sansad portal though Parliamentary Committee reports etc. Interestingly, a search on the keyword ‘organic’ or ‘jaivik kheti’ yields no references to any Parliamentary Committee report tabled in the Lok Sabha (out of 1415 Reports produced during the 17th Lok Sabha term). As a surrogate the ‘mobile app’ download information was investigated and yielded the following results:
i. The Google App Store indicates that the Jaivik Kheti App currently has 100K+ (i.e. approx. 1 lakh) downloads. However, an examination of the the app-users comments posted in the ‘feedback’ section of the download page revealed the following comments from users:
– August 16, 2020: Have downloaded it on 16th Aug 2020 which is the latest version. Really liked the idea and knowledge bank documents, But unable to do a seller registeration it keeps sending OTP and does not accept any OTP. Everytime you enter OTP and click on submit it sends another OTP, i have got almost 10 OTP. Please help we are really looking forward to leverage this.
– October 31, 2020: It is a fake app or now it is not functioning. I have ordered yesterday a bag of potato but nothing is updated yet. Only order status is showing transaction success. Kindly share whether it will be delivered or not?
– April 30, 2020: 1st of all It’s not Govt App, Extremely Poor App I have seen, I I don’t know how google allowed it. Not a single link is working, no information. Please don’t download and save time. यह सरकारी ऐप नही है, ऐकदम धटीया है, कुछ भी माहिती नही है, कृपया डाउनलोड न करें.

ii. The Govt. of India’s own App-Store (the gov.in app store) indicates the following: 0 downloads since August 20, 2021. See screenshot below.

It can therefore be concluded that:
The Government’s objectively verifiable performance is non-existent in this context (of setting up a functional e-commerce portal to enhance the availability of organic produce to the doorsteps of consumers), save merely the initial step of launching the portal and an app associated with it.

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