INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH VOLUME 9, ISSUE 02, FEBRUARY 2020 ISSN 2277-8616 3576 IJSTR©2020 www.ijstr.org Organic Certification And Marketing – An Inquiry On PGS India C.M.Ezhilvani, Dr.A.Jayakumar Abstract: Organic agriculture is a hasty emerging sector as the awareness towards health and environmental concerns are increasing among the world. Certification of the produce is really important in this sector, as the producers get easy access to fast-growing local, regional and international markets; and only then the organic products can be sold at premium price. There is short of detailed study on providing awareness on organic certification and required basic technical knowledge on digitalized organic products marketing to the organic products producer/farmers of our country. This study states about PKVY – Organic Certification Scheme by Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare for encouraging certified organic production in our country. This paper also includes ―Jaivi k-kheti‖, an E-Commerce portal as well as a platform of knowledge; provided by Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Keywords: Organic certification, Organic farmers, PGS – Participatory Guarantee System for India, PKVY – Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana, PGS – Jaivik-kheti, Online Market. ——————————  —————————— 1 INTRODUCTION Before the new regulation kicked in, only farmers and food processors exporting their products needed mandatory certification and domestic players could operate without a certification. ―The certification mark for genuine farmers, processors and manufactures, as currently, anyone can claim they are organic‖, says Pawan Kumar Agarwal, CEO, FSSAI; (Meenakshi Sushma). The first step taken by the Government was execution of the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP) in the year 2001. Next big step was the establishment of National Centre of Organic Farming (NCOF) which became responsible for implementation of the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS), a kind of free certification programme for organic farming, particularly suitable for domestic market. For online operation of PGS certification system, a web portal has also been started and can be accessed at www.pgsindia-ncof.gov.in. Table 1 Number of Farmer Groups, Farmers and Area cultivated under PGS India (2019) S.No Particulars Tamil Nadu India 1 Total Groups 308 11635 2 Total Group Members 5535 352928 3 Total Area (ha) 4164.4 266412.43 (Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Famers Welfare – Government of India – PGS) Based on the report provided by PGS India the above table includes the data of total number of Farmer groups, number of Group member (i.e) farmers which includes both organic approved and not approved Farmers along with the Organic farming area under PGS all over India and Tamil Nadu. Of all certifications in India, Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS), where farmers keep a check on each other works best, if the nearby famers do not do organic farming or do not follow the organic standards properly my certification will run the risk to be revoked, so will make sure the farms around mine are following organic standards‖ so look out for PGS India certification says, Mahesh G. / BCCL Andhra Pradesh (Kalyani Prasher). 2 LITERATURE REVIEW (Ashish Gupta) Farming as a profession is uniquely distinct from others. Access to services of various professions is required with a lesser frequencies e.g. the services of a doctor or a lawyer, whereas the services of the farmers are required for every meal we have, every day of our lives. (G Seetharaman 2017) PGS is more attuned to the India farming conditions and it can get a lot of farmers into the system. (IFOAM – Organic International PGS Team 2017) The unified regulation: The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) released the ―Food Safety and Standards (Organic Foods) Regulations 2017‖. In direct conflict with the fact that PGS and third party are the two recognized systems for verification of compliance for organic food products One option to address this problem is to completely remove the requirement in a future revised version of the NPOP. (Joe K. W. Hill 2016) presents a case study of Vikas Kendra, a project of Society for Equitable Voluntary Actions (SEVA), West Bengal. Vikas Kendra supports 57 PGS groups, each of six farmers. Suggest that scaling up the total area under organic production remains a challenge as does creating linkages between rural farmers and urban markets. 3 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM SECTIONS Certification is really important especially when it comes to organic products production in our country; where the complete knowledge on organic certification and its marketing among organic farmers is still low. There are only 309 organic farmer groups and 5535 farmers cultivating 4164.4 hectares in Tamil Nadu, which shows that the farmers in our state has to be provided with the awareness and the technical knowledge about organic farming certification and digitalized marketing of organic produce. 4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In this study an attempt has been made based on secondary sources from Government website/portal, Journals, Magazines and Media reports, etc. Data Source: PGS – This Website belongs to Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India Designed and Developed by Agriculture Informatics Division, National Informatics Centre, Ministry of Communication and IT, Govt. of India. 5 ORGANIC FARMING CERTIFICATION IN INDIA Organic farming acreage has increased to 27.7 lakh hectares during August 2019 from 23.02 lakh hectares which shows a