Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Wednesday launched a portal that will forecast wholesale prices of three key vegetables – tomato, onion and potato (TOP) – for three months and enable the government to monitor the supply situation for timely market interventions in case of a price crash during a glut.
The Minister said that the Market Intelligence and Early Warning System (MIEWS) is designed to provide advisories to farmers to avoid cyclical production as well as an early warning in a glut situation. She said the portal will enable the government come up with a rapid response in times of glut and move products to deficit regions. It will also help provide inputs for export and import decisions.
Alerts from the portal will help the government make timely market intervention under the Central scheme ‘Operation Greens’ by providing subsidy to farmers for storage and transportation of the produce from surplus markets to consuming market, she added.
The portal would disseminate all relevant information related to TOP crops such as prices and arrivals, area, yield and production, imports and exports, crop calendars and crop agronomy, in an easy-to-use visual format.
The alerts will be triggered when prices of these three perishable commodities fall to a three-year low at the time of harvest or when the price fall is more than 50 per cent compared with the year ago period or when the rate falls lower than the benchmark fixed by Centre/State government for a specified period, an official statement added.