Commodity Prices in India Today - Live Updates

What is a Commodity & Mandi Price?

A commodity here means a raw agricultural product, onion, tomato, wheat, rice and dozens of others, and a mandi is a wholesale market, usually run or regulated by a state Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC), where farmers sell their harvest to traders and merchants in bulk. The mandi price is not what you pay at your local vegetable shop, it's the wholesale rate one step earlier in the chain, and every mandi publishes three numbers for the same commodity on the same day: the minimum price paid, the maximum, and the modal price, the single most common price that day, which is the number most sites (including this one) lead with. Indians track these numbers for a few real reasons: as an early read on food inflation before it shows up in retail prices, as context for a farmer deciding where to sell this week's harvest, and simply to understand why the vegetable bill at home suddenly changed.

How Mandi Prices Are Set in India

At the most basic level, mandi prices move on ordinary supply and demand: right after a harvest, a lot of the crop hits the market at once and prices fall, while in the lean season between harvests, supply thins out and prices climb. Weather plays a large role in that supply, a poor or delayed monsoon, unseasonal rain right at harvest time, or a heatwave during a sensitive growing stage can all shrink the usable crop and push prices up with little warning. The government isn't entirely hands-off either: it sets a Minimum Support Price (MSP) for a number of crops, a floor price the government itself will pay if the open market falls below it, mainly for cereals and pulses rather than fast-perishing vegetables like onion and tomato, and it holds buffer stocks of some staples that can be released to cool down a genuine price spike. This page's live prices come from data.gov.in, the Government of India's open data platform, drawing on the same Agmarknet mandi-reporting network that state agricultural marketing boards feed into.

How to Understand Price Trends

Most vegetables and grains follow a recognisable seasonal cycle: prices are lowest right after harvest when supply is abundant, drift upward through the storage and lean months as that harvest gets used up, and reset lower again once the next harvest arrives. Onion and tomato are the most visible examples of this in Indian news, since both are grown widely but store poorly and have a genuine harvest-to-harvest gap, which is why their prices swing far more sharply through the year than a cereal like wheat, which stores well and reaches the market more steadily. None of this plays out identically every year, a single bad monsoon or an export policy change can override the usual seasonal pattern entirely, so the general cycle is a useful mental model, not a fixed calendar to plan around.

Best Time to Monitor & Buy

For a household, the practical takeaway is to watch prices around each staple's own harvest window and buy a bit extra of what stores reasonably well, onion in particular, when prices are at their seasonal low, rather than buying small quantities all year at whatever the lean-season price happens to be. For anyone watching the bigger picture, a sustained rise in mandi prices across several staples at once is one of the earlier signals of food inflation, and it's exactly the kind of signal the Reserve Bank of India watches when deciding whether inflation is becoming a policy concern, well before it shows up in a monthly inflation report. This page's live, market-by-market prices are a more current read on that than waiting for an official inflation number to catch up.

📊 Today's Price Spread Across Markets

Modal price (₹/quintal) for a few staples, lowest and highest tracked market today - the gap is usually a real regional supply difference, not noise. This site does not yet retain enough price history for a real week-over-week or year-over-year trend, so no such comparison is shown.

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