Geeta Nair
The ITC Agri Division’s e-Choupals is
all set to enter Maharashtra with a launch planned in August 2003. e-Choupals are
currently operational in Madhya Pradesh (MP), Uttar Pradesh (UP), Andhra Pradesh (AP) and
Karnataka. ITC’s Chief Executive of Agri business S Sivakumar said ITC would begin by
sourcing soyabean from Vidarbha with a network of 200 kiosks.
Till date the company had set up 2,400
e-kiosks covering 14,000 villages across four states and has invested Rs 70 crore on the
project.
ITC has an ambitious plan to cover one lakh
villages by 2010 with its e-Choupal network. e-Choupals, were introduced by ITC in 2000,
to improve the agriculture value chain.
It helps farmers in price discovery for
their produce by using information technology (IT), while the company benefits from
sourcing at the origin that brings in significant savings.
Such a sourcing mechanism eliminates the
middlemen, the frequent transportation that leads to handling losses and adds up to the
cost without any real value addition, Sivakumar said. The choupal helps in delinking price
discovery from the actual physical transaction.
ITC’s agri-business last year was to
the tune of Rs 1650 crore of which Rs 1100 was exports. ITC has been successfully sourcing
soyabean from MP, wheat from Lucknow, coffee from Bangalore and shrimps from Bhimavaram in
AP. The project is expected to break even in four years. Sourcing through e-Choupals has
been worth Rs 270 crore.
In Maharashtra, the e-Choupals will come up
in the Vidarbha region while the e-Choupal back office will be at Nagpur.
This year the company expects to source
produce worth Rs five crore from here and go up to Rs 50 crore during the next season.
