NEW DELHI: The Centre's Department of Consumer Affairs is monitoring prices of 38 food commodities such as cereals, pulses, vegetables, edible oils, and spices to control the volatility in prices, according to an official statement issued on Thursday.
The retail sale of chana, moong, and masur Bharat Dal brands at subsidised prices is being done to ensure the availability of essential food items to consumers at affordable prices, the statement said.
Intervention is also being undertaken through the Price Stabilisation Fund Scheme to provide subsidised onions and tomatoes to consumers so that the inflation burden is reduced.
The Price Monitoring Division oversees the implementation of daily price monitoring of essential food commodities and price stabilisation interventions. The Department collects daily retail and wholesale prices of 22 essential commodities and retail prices of 16 additional commodities from 555 price reporting centres through a mobile app viz. Price Monitoring System (PMS), the statement said. These daily prices constitute critical inputs to take decisions purport to mitigate price surges, market intervention, restricting import-export duties and calibrating the monetary policy.
Under the Price Stabilisation Fund, the government undertakes market interventions to control the volatility in prices of agri-horticultural commodities such as onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and pulses to protect the interests of consumers.
Market interventions primarily involve procurement of these commodities for buffer stock and undertaking strategic market disposals to contain price volatility. Buffer stocking also acts as a deterrent for unscrupulous speculations. The procurement of agri-horticultural commodities ensures remunerative prices to the farmers for their produce, the statement noted.
The Price Stabilisation Fund was set up with an initial corpus of Rs 500 crore to tackle price volatility in some agri-horticultural commodities viz. onion, potato and pulses to protect the interests of consumers. These commodities are to be procured from farmers/farmer’s associations at the time of harvesting and stored for regulated release during the lean season to help bring down their prices. The PSF Scheme has now been merged with other components of the PM-AASHA scheme of the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Therefore, PSF is now one of the components of the PM-AASHA umbrella scheme.
However, the PSF Scheme will continue to be managed by the Department of Consumer Affairs for price stabilisation interventions and daily price monitoring.
According to the statement, special steps are also being taken in North-Eastern states to boost production of pulses and horticultural crops and the government has also launched an initiative towards achieving self-sufficiency in pulses production by 2027.