Authors - Vinayak Kanhegaonkar, Ayush Mahant, Ali Sayyed, Abha Shah, Aparna Junnarkar Abstract - India’s farmers battle many challenges before they are able to sell their produce to the consumer, one such challenge is related to middlemen and market access. The current scenario is such that middlemen hold significant influence over the market. Middlemen are the intermediaries that farmers sell their produce to because of reasons such as lack of infrastructure, price fluctuations, limited storage facilities, lack of information and more. This causes farmers to lose much of their profit and overall reduces their income. Middlemen take substantial profits from their work; they buy for less from farmers and sell for more to consumers. Through our research we aim to create an app, KrishiMitra, for farmers to facilitate direct access to the market. KrishiMitra will be able to reflect real-time market prices, provide multilingual support, and have a bidding system. With this app we hope to provide farmers a platform to get fair prices, some bargaining power, proper and complete information about market prices and current trends. In the future, the application can be integrated with more services that address other challenges faced by farmers such as limited storage space for produce and climate change impacts on produce.
