Operating at the national level, the system covers more than 14 crore Aadhaar-linked farmers, more than 25 lakh retailers and about 7 crore metric tonnes of fertilizer sales transactions, and also supports the administration of annual fertilizer subsidy of about Rs 2 lakh crore.
Developed and technically supported by the National Informatics Center (NIC) for the Department of Fertilizers, IFMS connects the key stages of the fertilizer ecosystem. This includes production, import, transportation, stock availability, retailing and subsidy processing.
New dashboards and analytical tools have been developed to provide officials a consolidated overview of fertilizer production, imports, dispatch, movement, stock and retail sales.
These tools enable monitoring at national, state, district and retailer levels, helping to identify abnormal trends and emerging supply situations at an early stage.
An important step towards data-based fertilizer management has been the integration of IFMS with farmer, land and crop databases maintained by states and other government platforms.
In Haryana, work done towards integration with Meri Fasal Mera Byora (MFMB) and subsequent integration with Agristack established mechanisms to link fertilizer transactions to farmer and agriculturist information.
These initiatives provided valuable experience in linking fertilizer buyers to farmer and land records and highlighted practical issues related to the availability, completeness and quality of land and crop information.
They also demonstrated the ability to combine fertilizer transaction data with agricultural data to develop a better understanding of fertilizer requirements and consumption.
Storage Framework (FFS) has emerged as an important initiative that aims to integrate the mobile app-based fertilizer booking system with the existing IFMS Point of Sale (POS) ecosystem.
Under this framework, after verification of land and ownership details, the farmer can book the required fertilizer based on his ID created in Agristack.
A QR-code based booking is then generated, and the booking information is available on the POS device, enabling verification between the fertilizer required and the quantity ultimately purchased.