Krishna District Chilli and Cotton Market Yard to Go Cashless With E-Permits From July 1

A regional market yard in Krishna district that handles chilli and cotton trade is preparing to roll out an e-permit system for outbound transport from July 1, after yard chairman Kurra Apparao directed traders to fall in line with the new process at a review meeting held in the yard's committee hall.

Market yards like this one sit at a chokepoint in the agricultural supply chain: farmers and aggregators sell chilli and cotton through the yard, and traders then need a transport permit, tied to a cess payment, before they can move produce out by road. Historically, that cess has been paid in cash at the yard counter, a system that traders and officials alike acknowledge has been vulnerable to under-the-table collections and inconsistent record-keeping.

Under the new arrangement, all permit-related payments will move online. Traders will be able to pay the applicable cess from anywhere — without needing to be physically present at the yard — and then forward the digital permit details to their truck driver over WhatsApp before the vehicle leaves. Yard officials say the shift to a fully traceable, cashless ledger is intended to ensure that every rupee collected is accounted for, closing the gap that allowed illegal side-payments to slip through under the old cash-based process.

Chilli and cotton are both significant commercial crops for farmers in the region, and the trading volumes that pass through yards like this one make even modest per-load fees add up to meaningful sums over a season. Digitising that flow is part of a broader pattern across Andhra Pradesh's agricultural marketing infrastructure, where yards have been gradually moving licensing, weighing and payment functions online to reduce friction and leakage in cash-heavy rural trade.

Yard secretary Chandrika and other officials attended Tuesday's review session, where exporters and cotton traders were urged to familiarise themselves with the online process well before the July 1 switchover so that outbound shipments aren't held up once cash payments are phased out.