Paradise on earth, Kashmir is celebrated for its apples across the globe. It is home to almost 100+ varieties of apple. More than 40% of Kashmir's 80 lakh inhabitants, including seven lakh farmers, are involved in the apple trade. Growers and buyers are often distraught over the lack of quality assaying mechanisms and unreliable payment methods, which makes most of them feel short-changed in the current trade process. To add to it, growers often face limited access to outside markets and buyers and hence cannot get fair prices for their produce.

Praman.ai - the world's largest horticulture exchange, has been creating widespread excitement at the mandis of Shopian, Kulgam, Pulwama and Sopore. Living up to its promise, Praman.ai has been demonstrating and using its proprietary AI quality assaying technology to connect buyers from across the country with the apple growers and cold storages of Kashmir. By opening the mandis to digital quality assessment of the produce linked with online auctions for trade discovery, Praman.ai has ensured that the apple trade flourishes in the valley through objectivity, consistency and speed in the entire post-harvest supply chain.

Speaking on this, Praman's CEO, Saurabh S said, "The efforts of Praman have yielded positive results for the entire Apple ecosystem in Kashmir and has been blessed with the enthusiasm and forward-looking outlook of the J&K Horticulture Board and their officers at various Mandis. Their efforts have been unrelenting in bringing the benefits of digitalization to the apple growers across the valley."

Khan Mukhtar, area marketing officer at Directorate of Horticulture Planning and Marketing, J&K Govt, said, "The Department in association with Praman has started the digitalization of Fruit Mandi in Kulgam, first in the Union Territory to have such a digital marketing platform. Praman.ai has successfully re-engineered auctions and trade through AI-based quality assessment, making them data-driven and digital. As a truly digital exchange platform, Praman breaks the limitations of the current manual processes, automatically generating quality reports which are fed directly into the exchange platform. This resulted in fetching better prices to the farmers of the district."

Praman.ai has successfully addressed the trade challenges and integrated the entire apple trade value chain with automated processes from procurement till receipt. By providing huge benefits such as trade discovery, quality underwriting, guaranteed settlements along with access to logistics, warehousing, and credit financing, they have made accessible a full-stack ecosystem for the benefit of the grower and buyer community.

The digital quality assessment technology deployed at Praman provides spot quality assessment checks that are digital, verifiable, and scalable at every value chain stage. Praman's proprietary technology has also gone a long way in solving inventory management, logistics, sorting, grading, and packaging of horticulture produce. As next steps, Praman.ai shall be deploying the world's first multi-commodity, multi-channel sorter for automating the sorting and grading of apples at the mandis in Kashmir. These sorters will allow Growers to grade their produce and sell it at differential pricing quality. Similarly, the buyers will be able to avail of the grading service and pack similar grades together for ease of warehousing, logistics and further sales to consumers.

This harvest season has resulted in over Rs 50 crore of trade value being settled across Kashmir through Praman's digital quality assessment and price discovery in a time frame of just a month. Over 200 and a growing number of sellers and buyers are participating daily, and over 2000 trades are being settled in a month.