What's in a Place? On Platformization of Traditional Agricultural Marketplaces

In this paper, we pay ethnographic attention to the failed attempts at platformization of agricultural trade in one of Asia's largest onion markets, located in rural western Maharashtra. We focus on e-NAM, or the electronic National Agricultural Market, a statesponsored digital trading platform intended to create a transparent, efficient, and frictionless online national agricultural market by collapsing geographical barriers of traditional marketplaces, commonly known as mandis. We found that despite e-NAM's intended benefits, mandis continue to be the preferred mode of transaction for trading agricultural commodities. We demonstrate that these two agricultural marketplaces foster different meanings of information transparency, efficiency, and participation among stakeholders. In agrarian societies dominated by smallholder farmers, such as India, social collectives and non-economic relationships are crucial for providing safety and risk mitigation when dealing with perishable commodities like onions. We argue that e-NAM fails because its digital intermediation prioritizes an ahistorical and depoliticized free-market approach, which treats farmers (and traders) as independent units driven solely by the economic logic of demand and supply, disconnecting them from their historical and political agrarian social class.

• Applied computing → Agriculture; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.