Design and Evaluation of a Novel Model of IoT- Based Smart Grain Market

Abstract: Digital agricultural marketplaces can improve price discovery while leaving the physical grain-market workflow largely manual, fragmented and difficult to audit. Here we present an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for a smart grain market that links digital identity, gross and tare weighing, queue allocation, conveyor- assisted unloading, moisture sensing and conditional drying, automated sampling, quality records, e-NAM trading, payment tracking and market-exit control through a persistent lot identifier. The design also integrates low-power monitoring of lighting, water, waste, air quality and transport. Requirements were derived from a baseline survey of 290 grain-market stakeholders in Haryana and Punjab, India. The proposed system was subsequently explained and demonstrated to 702 stakeholders and evaluated using eight feature-level items. Across 5,609 valid item responses, 4,970 indicated approval (88.6%; Wilson 95% confidence interval, 87.7–89.4%). Approval was highest for anticipated time saving (95.0%) and labour reduction (91.6%), and remained above 83% for all evaluated features. These findings establish stakeholder acceptability and a traceable design rationale; they do not establish operational effectiveness because the complete architecture has not yet been tested in a live market. We therefore specify a staged pilot and falsifiable performance measures—including turnaround time, weighing disagreement, queue duration, energy and water use, system uptime and exception resolution—to convert the concept into field evidence. The study reframes the smart mandi as cyber-physical public infrastructure that complements, rather than replaces, the e-NAM transaction layer.

Keywords: Internet of Things; Smart Grain Market; e-NAM; LoRaWAN; Agricultural Marketing; Smart Mandi; Automation; Stakeholder Evaluation