New Delhi: A mobile app, which was launched on January 1, 2021 by the Department of Consumer Affairs of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, for monitoring and predictive analysis of prices of 22 essential commodities started providing effective real time information about retail and whole sale prices from 127 locations across the country, today.
Price reporting through Mobile App now ensures reporting from the market location as data are geo-tagged thereby displaying the location from where price data are reported.
As per the guidelines for retail price reporting, prices of the same variety of a commodity are to be collected from three markets – 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.
Reporting of static data from office desktop is now ruled out through the application of Mobile App. Now each Price Reporting Centre will haveto furnish market details such as names and addresses of the shops and markets from where prices are being collected daily.
It may be mentioned that the Department of Consumer Affairs monitors the price of 22 essential commodities – 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. Daily report of retail and wholesale prices are obtained from the 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, and export-import policy.
The Department has also proposed to the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) for Technical Assistance Fund under CARES Progamme of Asian Development Bank (ADB) for improving price monitoring and analysis. The activity components under the technical assistance are upgradation of price monitoring portal, capacity building for price reporting centres and price monitoring cell, identification of long-term improvements for food commodity supply chain & market efficiency. DEA has approved the proposal.
– global bihari bureau
