Daily Food Prices Data

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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
  2. Centre Selection
  3. Year Selection

Commodity List

[Updated 31st March 2022]

Commodity ID Commodity DoCA Commodity Group CEDA Commodity Group
1 Atta (Wheat) Grains & Pulses Grains
2 Gram Dal Grains & Pulses Pulses
3 Groundnut Oil (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
4 Gur Others Others
5 Masoor Dal Grains & Pulses Pulses
6 Milk @ Others Others
7 Moong Dal Grains & Pulses Pulses
8 Mustard Oil (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
9 Onion Vegetables Vegetables
10 Palm Oil (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
11 Potato Vegetables Vegetables
12 Rice Grains & Pulses Grains
13 Salt Pack (Iodised) Others Others
14 Soya Oil (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
15 Sugar Others Others
16 Sunflower Oil (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
17 Tea Loose Others Others
18 Tomato Vegetables Vegetables
19 Tur/Arhar Dal Grains & Pulses Pulses
20 Urad Dal Grains & Pulses Pulses
21 Vanaspati (Packed) Edible Oils Edible Oils
22 Wheat Grains & Pulses Grains

Centre List

[Updated 31st March 2022]

Centre ID Centre Zone
1 Adilabad South Zone
2 Agartala North-East Zone
3 Agra North Zone
4 Ahmedabad West Zone
5 Aizawl North-East Zone
6 Ajmer West Zone
7 Aligarh North Zone
8 Allahabad North Zone
9 Ambikapur West Zone
10 Amritsar North Zone
11 Araria East Zone
12 Ayodhya North Zone
13 Azamgarh North Zone
14 Balangir East Zone
15 Balasore East Zone
16 Banda North Zone
17 Bareilly North Zone
18 Baripada East Zone
19 Bathinda North Zone
20 Belagavi South Zone
21 Bellary South Zone
22 Bengaluru South Zone
23 Bengaluru (East Range) South Zone
24 Berhampur East Zone
25 Bhagalpur East Zone
26 Bharatpur West Zone
27 Bhopal West Zone
28 Bhubaneshwar East Zone
29 Bhuj West Zone
30 Bikaner West Zone
31 Bilaspur-Cg West Zone
32 Bilaspur-Hp North Zone
33 Bodeli West Zone
34 Bokaro East Zone
35 Chamba North Zone
36 Chandigarh North Zone
37 Chennai South Zone
38 Coimbatore South Zone
39 Cuddalore South Zone
40 Cuttack East Zone
41 Dantewada West Zone
42 Darbhanga East Zone
43 Dehradun North Zone
44 Delhi North Zone
45 Dhanbad East Zone
46 Dharamshala North Zone
47 Dharmapuri South Zone
48 Dharni West Zone
49 Dharwad South Zone
50 Dhavanagere South Zone
51 Dimapur North-East Zone
52 Dindigul South Zone
53 Durg West Zone
54 Ernakulam South Zone
55 Gangtok North-East Zone
56 Gaya East Zone
57 Giridhi East Zone
58 Gonda (Devipatan) North Zone
59 Gorakhpur North Zone
60 Gumla East Zone
61 Gurgaon North Zone
62 Guwahati North-East Zone
63 Gwalior West Zone
64 Haldwani North Zone
65 Hamirpur North Zone
66 Haridwar North Zone
67 Hisar North Zone
68 Hoshangabad West Zone
69 Hyderabad South Zone
70 Imphal North-East Zone
71 Indore West Zone
72 Itanagar North-East Zone
73 Jabalpur West Zone
74 Jadcherla South Zone
75 Jagdalpur West Zone
76 Jaipur West Zone
77 Jammu North Zone
78 Jamshedpur (East Singbhum) East Zone
79 Jeypore East Zone
80 Jhabua West Zone
81 Jhansi North Zone
82 Jodhpur West Zone
83 Jowai North-East Zone
84 Kalaburagi South Zone
85 Kanpur North Zone
86 Karimnagar South Zone
87 Karnal North Zone
88 Kasargod South Zone
89 Katihar East Zone
90 Khagaria East Zone
91 Kharagpur East Zone
92 Kohima North-East Zone
93 Kolkata East Zone
94 Kota West Zone
95 Kottayam South Zone
96 Kozhikode South Zone
97 Kupwara North Zone
98 Kurnool South Zone
99 Lohardaga East Zone
100 Lucknow North Zone
101 Ludhiana North Zone
102 Madhubani East Zone
103 Mahe South Zone
104 Mairang North-East Zone
105 Malda East Zone
106 Mandi North Zone
107 Mangalore South Zone
108 Mangaon-Raigad West Zone
109 Mayabunder South Zone
110 Meerut North Zone
111 Mirzapur (Vindhyanchal) North Zone
112 Moradabad North Zone
113 Morena West Zone
114 Motihari East Zone
115 Mumbai West Zone
116 Munger East Zone
117 Muzzafarpur East Zone
118 Mysore South Zone
119 Nagpur West Zone
120 Nashik West Zone
121 Nawada East Zone
122 Palakkad South Zone
123 Panaji West Zone
124 Panchkula North Zone
125 Pathanamthitta South Zone
126 Patna East Zone
127 Poonch North Zone
128 Port Blair South Zone
129 Puducherry South Zone
130 Pune West Zone
131 Purnia East Zone
132 Purulia East Zone
133 Raiganj East Zone
134 Raipur West Zone
135 Rajkot West Zone
136 Ramanathapuram South Zone
137 Rampurhat East Zone
138 Ranchi East Zone
139 Rewa West Zone
140 Rohtas (Sasaram) East Zone
141 Rourkela East Zone
142 Rudrapur North Zone
143 Sagar West Zone
144 Saharanpur North Zone
145 Saharsa East Zone
146 Sahibganj East Zone
147 Samastipur East Zone
148 Sambalpur East Zone
149 Saran East Zone
150 Selamba West Zone
151 Shahdol West Zone
152 Shillong North-East Zone
153 Shimla North Zone
154 Shivamogga South Zone
155 Siliguri East Zone
156 Simdega East Zone
157 Sohra North-East Zone
158 Solan North Zone
159 Srinagar North Zone
160 Surat West Zone
161 Suryapet South Zone
162 T.Puram South Zone
163 Thiruchirapalli South Zone
164 Thrissur South Zone
165 Tirunelveli South Zone
166 Tirupathi South Zone
167 Tumakuru South Zone
168 Tura North-East Zone
169 Udaipur West Zone
170 Ujjain West Zone
171 Una North Zone
172 Vapi West Zone
173 Varanasi North Zone
174 Vellore South Zone
175 Vijayapur South Zone
176 Vijaywada South Zone
177 Visakhapatnam South Zone
178 Waghai West Zone
179 Warangal South Zone
180 Wayanad South Zone

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.