Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Tuesday, 23 June 2026, witnessed Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah inaugurate three major digital and welfare initiatives for India's cooperative sector at a function in New Delhi. The launches — covering an e-auction portal, an enterprise resource planning system, and a scholarship scheme for farmers' children — mark a significant push to modernise NAFED, the apex agricultural cooperative marketing body.

What Was Launched

Amit Shah unveiled Nafex.in, NAFED's new e-auction portal designed to enable transparent online trading of agricultural commodities. Farmers, traders, millers, and other stakeholders will be able to access faster and more reliable buying and selling services through the platform, reducing dependence on opaque intermediary processes.

Alongside Nafex.in, Shah launched DRISHTI, an Enterprise Resource Planning portal that integrates NAFED's operations, inventory management, and stakeholder services into a single digital backbone. Chouhan described the initiatives as steps toward bringing 'transparency, efficiency, and good governance' (paaradarshhita, dakshata aur sushasan) to the cooperative sector.

The third initiative, the 'Kalyan' Scholarship Scheme, targets higher education and career development for the children of farmers affiliated with NAFED's cooperative network. The scheme signals an effort to link agricultural marketing reform with human-capital investment in rural communities.

Policy Backdrop

The Ministry of Cooperation was carved out as a separate ministry in July 2021 under Amit Shah, with a mandate to provide focused policy attention and digital infrastructure to India's vast cooperative ecosystem. Before that, cooperative affairs were handled within the Ministry of Agriculture.

The new launches sit within a broader pattern of digitisation that includes the computerisation of Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) and the expansion of the Electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM), which was launched in 2016 to create a unified online trading platform across mandis. Nafex.in is intended to extend similar transparency to NAFED's commodity trading operations.

Stakeholders and Impact

NAFED, established in 1958, operates as the apex body for cooperative procurement, marketing, and storage of agricultural produce across India. Its member societies represent millions of farmers, making the adoption of Nafex.in and DRISHTI consequential for price realisation at the farm level.

Traders and millers who interact with NAFED's procurement and storage operations are also direct beneficiaries, as the ERP system is expected to reduce processing delays and improve service reliability. The Kalyan Scholarship Scheme adds a social-sector dimension, addressing a long-standing gap in welfare support for families within the cooperative network.

What's Next

The immediate test for all three initiatives will be uptake among state-level cooperatives and NAFED's trading partners. Analysts will watch whether Nafex.in achieves meaningful transaction volumes and whether DRISHTI is integrated with existing agri-stack infrastructure, including the PACS computerisation programme. The Kalyan Scholarship Scheme's eligibility criteria, beneficiary numbers, and disbursement timelines are yet to be widely detailed. Together, the three launches reinforce the government's stated goal of making the cooperative sector a 'pillar of the rural economy' through technology-led reform.