NAFEX.in, the e-auction portal will connect farmers directly to bidders.
New Delhi: The National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India launched its e-auction portal NAFEX.in on 23 June in New Delhi, with Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation Amit Shah presiding over the event. The portal is designed to allow farmers to list and auction agricultural produce digitally with buyers placing competitive bids on the platform and payment credited directly to the seller’s bank account within 48 hours of a completed transaction. The launch was part of a broader set of four digital and institutional initiatives unveiled by NAFED on the same day.
Four Initiatives Launched Together
The four programmes announced areNAFEX.in, DRISHTI, an enterprise resource planning system and NAFED Kalyan. Each addresses a different layer of NAFED’s operations.
DRISHTI is an inventory and procurement monitoring system. It is designed to give NAFED’s central management real-time visibility into stock levels procurement progress and warehouse utilisation across locations. Without such a system procurement decisions at the district level often happen in silos creating mismatches between what is procured and what can actually be stored or moved. DRISHTI is intended to resolve that coordination gap digitally.
The ERP platform handles NAFED’s internal financial and administrative operations purchase orders, accounts, vendor management and compliance tracking replacing what were reportedly fragmented legacy systems across regional offices. Together DRISHTI and the ERP are backend infrastructure. NAFEX.in is the farmer-facing front end that those systems are meant to support.
NAFED Kalyan, the fourth initiative is a welfare programme for farmer families. It includes a scholarship scheme funded from 1% of NAFED’s annual profits. Based on the government’s profit figures of ₹500 crore this would translate to roughly ₹5 crore annually for education support. Eligibility criteria and disbursement mechanisms for the scheme have not been made public yet.
How NAFEX.in Is Meant to Work
NAFEX.in functions as a digital marketplace layered on top of NAFED’s existing procurement network. Registered farmers list their produce on the portal with quantity and quality details. Buyers which include institutional purchasers, processors and cooperative bodies place bids. The platform is intended to generate transparent price discovery through competitive bidding rather than negotiated rates set by intermediaries.
The 48-hour direct bank transfer commitment is the portal’s clearest differentiator from the existing mandi system where payment timelines are often longer and pass through commission agents before reaching the farmer. However onboarding farmers onto a digital auction platform requires reliable internet connectivity, smartphone access and a degree of digital literacy preconditions that are unevenly distributed across rural India. The NAFEX.in and e-Samridhi platforms feature dedicated internal technical helpdesks. When a transaction fails a unique Transaction ID or Bidding ID is generated. Users can log a dispute directly through the portal’s support interface using this ID which routes the issue to NAFED’s finance and IT divisions for manual verification against their bank’s ledger.
The Pulses Procurement Target
Home Minister said NAFED and NCCF will procure every quantity of pulses directly from farmers within two years. India imports significant quantities of pulses annually the country has structurally struggled to achieve self-sufficiency in this crop category. Direct government procurement at minimum support price if operationalised at a scale, could reduce farmer dependence on private traders who dominate the mandis and often purchase below MSP during glut seasons.
Shah said the infrastructure for direct procurement of pulses, maize and other produce has been built over the past three years. NAFED’s turnover has grown from ₹20,000 crore to ₹30,000 crore since the Ministry of Cooperation was established in 2021 and its net worth has risen from ₹358 crore to ₹2,050 crore.
NCCF’s Role in the Procurement Architecture
NCCF established in 1965, is the apex body of consumer cooperatives in India and operates under the Ministry of Cooperation. While NAFED handles the agricultural marketing side procurement from farmers NCCF’s role in pulses procurement has grown significantly under the Price Support Scheme with both organisations jointly mandated to undertake 100% procurement of tur, urad and masoor from key producing states. The Union Budget 2025 extended this joint procurement initiative for four additional years up to 2028-29. Together the two organisations are meant to function as a twin-track cooperative procurement system NAFED anchoring the farmer-side supply chain and NCCF managing distribution and consumer-end operations. The NAFEX.in portal in this architecture is designed to be the digital entry point through which both organisations receive and process farmer supply at scale.
Questions the Launch Leaves Open
NAFEX.in’s real test will come at harvest time, when procurement volumes spike simultaneously across multiple states and the 48-hour payment window will face its sharpest operational stress. Whether NCCF and NAFED can absorb the full volume of pulses production directly without routing through private traders or commission agents within the two-year window is the larger unresolved question. Similar commitments on direct procurement have appeared in earlier policy cycles. Whether the digital infrastructure now being built changes that outcome remains to be seen.
About the Author
