JumpStartIndia@ISB – Project Proposal

Title
Analysis of wheat procurement in Punjab for Rabi 2020 and lessons for future
Faculty Members
Ashwini Chhatre, Aaditya Dar, Sarang Deo, Sripad Devalkar
Topic
Food and Agriculture
Description
Background: Agriculture is the mainstay of the rural economy in Punjab with close to 17 lakh
farmers in the state. Government of Punjab (GoP) is anticipating procurement of close to 135 LMT
of wheat during the Rabi season of 2020. Procurement of the wheat and paddy in the Rabi and
Kharif seasons each year by various government agencies is critical to ensure the availability of
food grains for various government schemes such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) and
meet the food security needs of the country.
Problem: The trends of wheat arrivals in past years exhibit significant variation in spatial and
temporal patterns of arrivals across districts, market centres and months. Most of the grains arriving
at a given purchase centre arrive within a period of 15 days. Variations in harvest dates,
connectivity to purchase centres, proximity between purchase centres and production dominant
areas and size of purchase centres lead to the 15 days of major arrivals being different across
different purchase centres. Further, these procurement windows are marked by days of peak
arrivals, with quantity received on the peak days being as high as 8 times the average quantity
received per day in some centres.
The need to maintain physical distancing requirements to prevent spread of COVID-19 infections
during the procurement season posed a set of unique challenges to the normal functioning of
agricultural markets. To meet this challenge, the GoP implemented a staggered procurement
process to “flatten” the wheat arrival curve from 15 days to 45 days and control the number of
people present in a purchase centre on any given day. To achieve this, the government implemented
the following measures:
1. Control the number of farmers arriving at any purchase centre on a given day by issuing tokens
to farmers and allowing only farmers with a valid token to bring their grains.
2. Open temporary purchase centres for operation to reduce the total quantity received in any
given centre.
The government would like to i) document the impact of the procurement process implemented
this Rabi season, ii) draw lessons from the current implementation to refine the process for
procurement of paddy in Kharif 2020-21 and possibly as a regular procurement process in the
future.
Approach: The project will involve understanding institutional and operational details of
procurement operations, analyzing data on arrivals, purchases, and transport of grains from the

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various purchase centres, scenario modeling and interpreting results of scenario analysis to draw
lessons for improving the design of procurement operations for other agricultural commodities.
Deliverables: The team will interact closely with officials of the Punjab Mandi Board, and other
government agencies as required. The team is expected to analyze available data on wheat arrivals
for 2019-20 and 2020-21, create data visualizations, model various scenarios, and interpret results
from the scenario analysis. The final deliverables of the project include i) a teaching case that can
be used in business school courses on basic operations management and/or public policy courses
and ii) a white paper on the implementation and impact of a staggered procurement process. Other
deliverables such as basic data visualization / decision support / scenario modeling tools may be
required depending on project progress and availability of data.
Other details: This is the first in a set of projects related to design of large-scale agricultural
commodity procurement processes. Other projects in this set (to be started later) will involve case
study of innovations in crop procurement operations undertaken by other state governments such
as Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, etc. to overcome challenges posed by the COVID-19
pandemic for a comparative analysis of procurement models, optimization of transportation and
storage decisions by government procurement agencies.
Duration
3 to 4 months
Skills Required
The team should ideally have the following expertise and/or experience:
1. Background knowledge of government procurement programs for important food crops
such as paddy and wheat.
2. Training or experience in compiling, handling, analyzing, and creating visualizations of
large datasets.
3. Ability to build mathematical models for scenario analysis.
4. Superior writing skills. Any prior experience of writing case-studies and/or white papers is
a plus.
5. Preparing presentations and reports.
Clients (actual or intended)
State Government of Punjab and other states, faculty in Operations Management and Public Policy
areas of business schools worldwide.
Application Process
Students who are interested in the project must first download the proposal onto their system and
subsequently must fill out the application form by clicking here.
The deadline for submitting the project application form is June 7, 2020 at 11:59 PM.