evidence: Experts had said at the time improving agricultural marketing infrastructure and increasing the number of APMCs in the country was the need of the hour, rather than what the government had done. [...] The haats may be upgraded into rural level agri-market platforms and be kept outside the ambit of the State Marketing Act, so as to enable them to directly link the farm gate with wholesale terminal markets, national and international. These would also support local retail between farmers and consumers, and direct marketing to supply retail requirements at terminal markets. [...] He had added that an Agri-Market Infrastructure Fund, with a corpus of Rs 2,000 crore will be set up for developing and upgrading agricultural marketing infrastructure in the 22,000 GrAMs and 585 APMCs.