A Study of the Agricultural Markets of Bihar, Odisha and Punjab

A Study of the Agricultural Markets of Bihar, Odisha and Punjab was published in December 2020 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Advanced Study for India (CASI). The report was released as part of CASI’s partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, under which a team of economists, anthropologists and political scientists carried out an extensive study of agricultural markets between 2017 and 2019 in three Indian states: Bihar, Odisha and Punjab. The report’s authors are Shoumitro Chatterjee, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Devesh Kapur and Marshall M. Bouton – scholars associated with CASI.The publication studies the agricultural market systems and sites such as Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandis in these three states. It assesses the ways in which markets function for various agrarian commodities and in different locations; how farmers interact with markets and intermediaries; and the factors determining crop prices for farmers. The study employed various methods and an interdisciplinary approach to data sets to provide a multifaceted understanding of India’s diverse and complex agricultural markets.The 196-page report contains 13 chapters divided into two parts. Part One consists of an Introduction to the Project (Chapter 1); Analytical Toolkit: Understanding Agricultural Markets and Commodity Supply Chains (Chapter 2); Farmers and Markets: The First Sale and Its Role in Realised Prices (Chapter 3); Location: Distance to Markets and Mandis (Chapter 4); Public Policy and Agricultural Markets: MSP, Procurement, and Risk (Chapter 5); Market Systems: Sites, Infrastructure and Regulation (Chapter 6); Market Systems and Intermediaries: Case Study of Bihar (Chapter 7); Market Systems and Networks: Commodity Case Studies from Odisha (Chapter 8) and Summary of Findings (Chapter 9). Part Two analyses data from the commodity markets studied in Part One through the chapters Land (Chapter 10); Crops (Chapter 11); Costs of Production (Chapter 12) and Commodity Supply Networks (Chapter 13).