Muhammad Arif has been selling wheat at the Sheikhupura grain market for nineteen years.
For most of those years, he arrived at the mandi the same way every farmer in his village did — loading his harvest onto a tractor-trolley before dawn, driving forty minutes to the market, and then waiting. Waiting for a trader to approach him. Waiting to hear a price. Waiting to find out whether this season’s work had been worth it.
“You don’t know what the price is until they tell you,” he explained to our team last spring. “And by then, you’ve already unloaded everything. What are you going to do — load it back?”
This is not a negotiation. It is a ritual of surrender.
Arif is not unusual. Across Punjab’s smallholder farming belt, an estimated 70–80% of farmers sell their produce within 48 hours of harvest — not because the price is right, but because they have no storage, no cash reserve to wait, and crucially, no information. They do not know what wheat fetched yesterday in Lahore. They do not know what traders in Faisalabad are paying this week. They arrive at the mandi blind, and traders — who track prices across dozens of markets daily — know it.
The result is a structural information gap that costs Punjab’s smallholder farmers billions of rupees every single year.
PRAT set out to close it.
The Problem With “Market Prices”
Before we explain what PRAT built, it is worth understanding why price information is harder to access than it sounds.
Pakistan does have official commodity price data. The Punjab Agricultural Marketing Company (PAMCO) and various government agencies publish mandi rates — but inconsistently, often with a lag of days or weeks, and almost exclusively in formats that require internet access, literacy, and some technical fluency to use. A farmer in Sheikhupura with a basic phone and a Class 5 education cannot navigate a government portal to check last Tuesday’s wheat rate.
Private aggregators exist too, but they serve traders, exporters, and commodity brokers — not the sellers at the bottom of the supply chain.
The people who most need price data are the last to receive it. By the time information trickles down to the village level, it is stale, distorted, or filtered through the same intermediaries who benefit from farmers staying uninformed.
What PRAT Built: A Simple System for a Stubborn Problem
PRAT’s approach was deliberately low-tech. Not because we lack ambition, but because we understand our users.
The farmers in our pilot districts — Sheikhupura, Nankana Sahib, and parts of Kasur — predominantly use basic feature phones. Smartphone penetration among smallholders over 40 is low. Internet connectivity in rural areas is unreliable. Any solution that required an app, a data connection, or a WhatsApp account was going to exclude the farmers who needed help most.
So we built around SMS.
Here is how the system works:
Data collection. A small network of PRAT field monitors — locally hired young men and women from the farming communities themselves — physically visit the main mandi in their assigned area each morning during peak trading seasons. They record the opening, mid-day, and closing prices for the five most traded commodities in that market: wheat, rice, maize, onion, and potato. This data is entered into a simple Google Form on their phones and feeds into a central database.
Processing and verification. At PRAT’s Lahore coordination office, a part-time data associate cross-checks incoming figures against the previous day’s rates and any available PAMCO data, flagging anomalies for review. The process takes under an hour.
Distribution. By 10 AM each trading day, a formatted price bulletin is sent via bulk SMS to every registered farmer in the corresponding district. The message is in Urdu, written at a sixth-grade reading level. It contains the previous day’s closing price, the current morning’s opening price, and a one-line note if the trend is rising or falling.
A typical message looks like this:
Sheikhupura Mandi — 14 March 2025 Wheat: Rs. 3,850/40kg (kal: Rs. 3,790) ↑ Maize: Rs. 2,100/40kg (kal: Rs. 2,080) → PRAT helpline: 0300-XXXXXXX
That is it. No app. No internet. No literacy barrier beyond basic Urdu numerals.
What Happened in Sheikhupura
The pilot launched in April 2024 across 14 villages in Sheikhupura district, with 212 registered farmer households receiving daily SMS updates during the wheat harvest window (April–June).
We tracked outcomes through a combination of farmer-reported sale data and follow-up interviews conducted six weeks after harvest.
The results exceeded our initial projections:
- Average sale price received by SMS-registered farmers: Rs. 3,940 per 40kg
- Average sale price received by non-registered farmers in the same villages: Rs. 3,710 per 40kg
- Difference: Rs. 230 per 40kg — approximately 6.2%
For a farmer selling 100 maunds of wheat (4,000 kg), that 6.2% gap translates to roughly Rs. 23,000 in additional income per harvest season — a meaningful sum in households where total annual cash income rarely exceeds Rs. 300,000.
How did SMS recipients capture better prices? The interviews told a consistent story. Farmers who knew the mandi rate before arriving were more likely to:
- Hold their harvest an extra day or two if the morning message showed a rising trend
- Visit a second mandi if the first trader’s offer was significantly below the SMS rate
- Negotiate with a specific number in hand rather than accepting the first offer
“Before, I would just take what they gave me,” said one farmer from Chuharkana. “Now I tell them I know the price. Sometimes they argue. But I stand there. Usually they come up.”
Information changed the power dynamic — not by removing intermediaries, but by making farmers harder to exploit within the existing system.
The Limits We Are Honest About
PRAT does not overclaim. The SMS system is a first step, not a complete solution.
Storage remains the binding constraint. A farmer who knows prices are rising but has no storage capacity and a debt payment due tomorrow cannot wait for a better day. Price information without access to storage infrastructure — or short-term bridge financing — only helps farmers who have the flexibility to act on it. Many don’t. Addressing this requires partnerships with warehouse operators and microfinance institutions, which PRAT is actively pursuing.
The intermediary system is not inherently evil. Traders and arhtiyas (commission agents) provide real services — credit, logistics, market access. The goal is not to eliminate them but to ensure farmers enter those relationships with enough information to be treated as participants rather than captives.
Urban price volatility doesn’t always reach the farmer. When retail onion prices in Lahore spike, the farmgate price often doesn’t move proportionally. The margin gap is absorbed by the middle layers. SMS alerts about mandi prices help at the first sale point — but deeper structural reform of the supply chain is needed to pass more value back to the grower.
We name these limits because sustainable agricultural development requires honesty about what works, what doesn’t, and what requires more than a single intervention to fix.
What Comes Next
The Sheikhupura pilot is being expanded. In the Kharif 2025 season, PRAT aims to bring the SMS price system to three additional districts, covering an estimated 800 farmer households and adding rice and sugarcane to the commodity list.
We are also in early conversations with a Pakistani agritech startup about building a lightweight voice-call option for farmers who cannot read Urdu — a missed call triggers an automated voice message reading the day’s prices aloud in Punjabi. If the technical and cost hurdles can be cleared, this could extend price access to the most marginalized segment of the smallholder population.
And longer term, we believe the data we are collecting has value beyond the farmers themselves. Two seasons of granular, village-level price data — cross-referenced with weather, harvest volumes, and sale outcomes — is the kind of dataset that agricultural researchers, policymakers, and development finance institutions rarely have access to. PRAT intends to publish this data openly, because the information gap we are trying to close affects everyone who depends on Punjab’s food system.
A Note on What “Empowerment” Actually Means
The word empowerment gets used often and cheaply in development work. PRAT tries to be careful with it.
Muhammad Arif, the Sheikhupura farmer we opened with, received our SMS updates throughout the 2024 wheat season. He sold at Rs. 3,920 per 40kg — Rs. 180 above what his neighbor, who was not registered, received on the same day.
When we asked him what the difference felt like, he did not use the word empowered. He said something simpler.
“I felt like I was a part of the market. Not just something the market happened to.”
That is what fair access to information does. It does not guarantee a perfect outcome. It does not eliminate structural inequality overnight. But it restores a basic dignity to the transaction — the sense that you know what is happening, that you are not being taken advantage of simply because no one told you the number.
For 212 farmers in Sheikhupura last spring, that was real. It showed up in their bank balances, their loan repayments, and their willingness to try again next season.
For PRAT, that is enough reason to keep going — and to keep building
