NCDEX offers to market agricultural produces

Chennai, June 19 (UNI) The National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Ltd (NCDEX) can help the Government halve its huge food subsidy, if it is allowed to play a role in handling marketing of agricultural produces in the country, its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer P H Ravikumar opined today.

Addressing a press conference here, he said the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was now handling food grain procurement on behalf of the Union Government. Instead of the Government taking physical delivery and holding agricultural produces in its godowns, the NCDEX could procure it online on behalf of FCI, making the farmers hold the stock themselves and deliver at the points required. This would eliminate the transportation and inventroy costs and the saving would be around Rs 13,000 crore, he claimed.

Mr Ravikumar said the objectives of the exchange included providing a platform for fair price discovery, price risk management, real time information dissemination and ensuring orderly functioning of markets.

He said the exchange would provide an anonymous electronic auction platform for which they had established 20,000 terminals in 770 centres across the country, to ensure transparent price discovery, counter party risk guarantee and liquidity to participants.

To a question, he said the recent study of the National Institute of Agricultural Marketing, Jaipur, concluded that wheat farmers have received better price on account of futures trading in 2006.

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