It has never even come up why we are doing it. We do not consider this profit making, but just want to make it self-sustaining. As an exchange, we believe, we have a social function. If everyone has information, it levels the playing field and farmers can benefit.

• How far can price discovery alone help in alleviating the information asymmetry?

Price discovery is just one aspect of removing information asymmetry. When we started setting up price tickers we found that more needs to be done to enable farmers to take advantage of price information. Price ‘discovery’ makes certain things (like selling at higher prices) possible but bottlenecks still exist. They need support infrastructure like warehouses, cold chains, storage facilities, etc. This is when farmers started asking us “Can’t you do more?”. We enable seed procurement through our network.

• What is the extent of price uniformity that can be achieved by price discovery?

It is difficult to define the extent of price uniformity, but we have seen that there is actually more price uniformity now, compared to when the country had no futures markets. Price uniformity is good for the weaker parts of the commodity chain, which benefits producers and market efficiencies have also improved which benefits consumers.

• What are the business opportunities for entrepreneurs in this system?

There’re a lot of opportunities for rural entrepreneurs. They can connect to a larger market through the terminals and information kiosks. Moreover, each terminal is an employment generator. A terminal is connected to the exchange and is operated by a broker or a group of people. A number of people work under this operator, who keep the farmers abreast of the latest prices and help the broker procure from the local level.

... contd.