Most of the time the Mallah community do not have enough money to run the whole business of Makhana processing and so they have to sell out popped Makhana in the local market at very low price just to continue the work. Is there a way to facilitate them with co-operative kind of set up to sell their product directly in the big mandis and to their customers at large scale?
first try to create awareness among Mallah Community to standardize their processed products and create a 'brand' for their product (This you have to do as a registered society on co-operative means). once you create a brand of Makhana based on quality parameters then you can think of linking to any market. once the brand is created I think brand will take care of the marketing aspect and there is no problem in sales of Makhana. I hope this will be of some help to you.
Thanks for the reply Venu Prasad H D. I guess the what you have suggested could be of great use. However, since the whole family remain so engrossed with production work and they produce so much in a single season that they do not get the time to do any branding. Plus they constantly need to sell the produce to buy the Makhana seeds for further processing. Also, most of them are not literate.
So, I am worried how they would get the appropriate price for their produce, provided they are constrained by time and know how of selling product direct in the whole sale market.