Mobile App for price monitoring for essential commodities

A Mobile App for price monitoring of essential commodities has been launched by Department of Consumer Affairs during January 2021. The app provides effective real time information about retail and whole sale prices from 127 locations across the country.

Need for the app

Daily report of retail and wholesale prices are obtained from 127 price reporting centres located in State Food & Civil Supplies Departments across the country. The daily report of prices and indicative price trends are analysed for taking appropriate decisions such as release of stocks from the buffer, export-import policy etc. 

The mobile app is expected to improve the quality of prices data for reporting daily prices by the price reporting centres. 

List of essential commodities covered

The Department of Consumer Affairs monitors the price of 22 essential commodities viz., rice, wheat, Atta (wheat), Gram Dal, Tur/Arhar Dal, Urad Dal, Moong Dal, Masoor Dal, Sugar, Milk, Groundnut oil, Mustard oil, Vanaspati, Soya oil, Sunflower oil, Palm oil, Gur, Tea, Salt, Potato, Onion and Tomato.

Features of the app

• Price reporting through Mobile App ensures reporting from the market location as data are geo-tagged thereby displaying the location from where price data are reported.
• Reporting of static data from office desktop is ruled out through the application of Mobile App. Therefore, the condition to operationalise Mobile App is that each Price Reporting Centre has to furnish market details such as names and addresses of the shops and markets from where prices are being collected daily.
• As per the guidelines for retail price reporting, prices of the same variety of a commodity are to be collected from three markets, viz., High Income Market, Middle Income Market and Low Income Market, and the average of the three prices is to be reported. The Mobile App has inbuilt feature to calculate and report the average price. This helps in avoiding human errors in calculation.
• Market information from Agmarknet, Agriwatch, NAFED and trade associations also constitute inputs for price analyses. The services of Agriwatch is being used for providing market intelligence, predictive analysis of prices and to develop price forecasting model.

Daily price data of essential commodities

To view the daily price data of essential commodities, click here. 

Source : Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution