Agricultural marketing in the country with particular focus on market intelligence has not received adequate attention. The wide fluctuation in prices for agricultural commodities is one of the major risks farmers face. These fluctuations have some regular patterns: seasonal, cyclical and secular, but every year they depart from these patterns quite erratically. Most of the price forecasts do not cover all factors responsible for price fluctuations including those determining erratic behavior.

The broad policy reforms in terms of modified APMC Act in 2003 and e-NAM in 2015 have not paid adequate attention on market intelligence. Furthermore, the market intelligence with specific focus on farmer producer organizations is still in nascent stage. Also the potential benefits of Machine learning techniques, artificial intelligence, and satellite data has hardly been reaped.

In the changing world trade environment, generation and dissemination of trade related information and intelligence is sine-qua-none. However, the thrust on global market intelligence is inadequate. As far as the education and capacity building is concerned, in spite of mushroom growth of academic institutions in the country, there is felt need of specialized human resource development in agriculture market intelligence with particular focus on involvement of PG students.

The proposed project on agriculture market intelligence is comprehensive in nature and encompasses all important issues including demand-supply predictions and price forecasting apart from using satellite imageries for model building, farmer producer organizations for realizing better prices, continuous studying and monitoring of e-NAM linked APMCs, and private sector involvements with focus on PPP mode. Rigorous analysis of trade related aspects and prompt dissemination of the distilled information to the stake holders will be a vital segment of the projects to understand the linkages between national and international markets, export potential & changing policy environment.

The project will also cover major components of education, and capacity building of various stakeholders through certificate and PG diploma course and e-learning short duration courses. Involvement of PG students through various activities including Project/Thesis work, exposure visits, specialized lecture series and exchange programme will be one of the major activities to meet the stipulated objectives of the centre.