Centre launches mobile app for price monitoring of essential commodities

The Centre has unveiled a mobile application for effective monitoring or wholesale and retail prices of 22 essential commodities on a daily basis.

With the launch of the app, static data entry of prices of essential commodities is set to be consigned to history books as price reporting centres will now have to specify details of markets and shops from where the prices are collected.

“The daily report of prices and indicative price trends are analysed for taking appropriate decisions such as the release of stocks from the buffer and export-import policy,” a government official said.

The Department of Consumer Affairs monitors prices of rice, wheat, wheat flour, 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.

The price data is being collected from 127 centres across the country through food and civil supplies departments of state governments.

As per the guidelines for retail price reporting, the 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 department said that the mobile app has an 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 analysis.