Daily Food Prices Data

Overview

The Department of Consumer Affairs hosts a division called the Price Monitoring Cell, which is responsible for collating the daily retail and wholesale prices of 22 essential commodities from about 180* centres spread across India. Using the State Civil Supplies Departments of various regions and a geotagged verification system with multiple crosschecks (raw data is compared with the reports of FCI and NFAED), the PMC is able to achieve highly accurate daily estimates at the market level, which are then made public the same day.

CEDA performs a high-frequency scrape of their portal to maintain an up-to-date price tracker while allowing for visualizations of each commodity at the centre, zone and all-India level. This enables users to monitor granular changes in food prices in the Indian economy in real-time. The portal also allows users to access the raw data in an easily downloadable format. As of 29th March 2022, our mirror dataset stands at 5.8+ Million retail and 5.4+ Million wholesale data points reported over a span of 13 years.

Data Cleaning

We screen for outliers in the raw DoCA data by filtering out any commodity-centre level entries which show a 1000% change in their prices. Since such cases are rare, we adopt a manual verification approach before dropping them. From 1st January 2009 to 30th April 2022, only 4 genuine outliers are present in the retail subset (out of 5.8 million) and 63 in the wholesale subset (out of 5.4 million). These have been subsequently removed.

We have integrated this check into our pipeline, and with every daily scrape, our validation script confirms whether all data points are legitimate. If any sudden spikes or drops are found, we are notified and manually judge whether the entry is incorrect.

Time Series Feature

We provide three modes to graph the cleaned out data points —

1. Daily: Every non-null data point is plotted for the selected commodity and centre(s).
2. Monthly: One data point for each month between the start and end date is calculated by averaging over the prices of the selected data subset. Non-null data points are disregarded while finding the mean.
3. 7 Day Moving Average: A particular day’s plotting point is calculated by averaging over the past 7 days’ non-null prices. This generates a smoother graph by eliminating short-lived price peaks and drops.

Raw Dataset Download

Users can download the cleaned raw data in CSV format (same variables as mentioned before) from our website by following these steps:

1. Commodity Selection
   • We allow multiple and unrestricted commodity selections via a checkbox feature.
2. Centre Selection
   • The centre selection is restricted to one centre per download request (there is no download limit).
3. Year Selection
   • Given the size of the DoCA PMC data, we have restricted period selection to 1 year.
   • Retail and Wholesale price data begins from 2009.
   • Current day’s data will only become available at 6 PM the following day to ensure a lag for any updates on previous data, i.e. 1st January 2022 data will be live on our website after 6PM 2nd January 2022.

Commodity List

[Updated 31st March 2022]

Centre List

[Updated 31st March 2022]

Acknowledgements: Tanish Bafna, an undergraduate student at Ashoka and an intern with CEDA during 2021-22, led the initiative to develop the Daily Food Prices tool.