Impact analysis of assaying parameter on commodity prices: Rashtriya e-Market services Pvt Ltd.

Abstract

Value chain in the marketing of agricultural commodities plays a key importance and turns to one among the deciding factor in setting up of end prices of these commodities in the market. Through data analysed from several years of agricultural product data sold in India, it is found out that intermediaries in the form of agents (who work for commission) at Government regulated markets (mandi) work around at roughly 5 % margins, in the wholesale markets they make 30%, and finally the retailers selling directly to the consumers make somewhere around 20 to 30%1 . In order to fix this, there was a need for a Government body to intervene and regulate market prices in such a way that farmers get benefitted. ReMSL came into existence. The presence of such a platform will encourage quality-based bidding for the agricultural produce. After limiting the number of intermediaries, next step in the process was to improve the system in such a way that best results are obtained. Several actions and measures to incorporate this. The assaying of agricultural produce directly at the market level becomes an importance measure to upgrade / increase the marketability of the commodities. This will further help the farmers to realize their produce prices proportionate to their quality2 . The project that we are handling covers the area between post-production of crops and processing them. The process of assaying happens in order to test the quality of crops before it was sold. Our goal is to do impact assessment of these assaying parameters over the trading prices of the agricultural commodities being sold in various mandis. The assessment is carried out with the help of statistical tools to develop a rigid model which measures the key impact parameters every time new set of data are added