Mandi prices — what minimum, maximum and modal mean

A mandi price report is one line per commodity per market per day, and the line has three prices on it. Read correctly, the three numbers tell you not just what the crop fetched but how the day’s trade went. Read carelessly, they mislead — the maximum is not “the price”, and neither is the minimum.

Where the numbers come from

Agricultural produce in most states is sold through regulated markets run by market committees (APMCs). Each market reports its day’s arrivals and prices, commodity by commodity and often variety by variety, to Agmarknet, the portal of the Directorate of Marketing & Inspection under the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. The same reports are republished as an open dataset on data.gov.in, which is where this site fetches them. Prices are in rupees per quintal — 100 kilograms — and arrivals in tonnes.

The price is what the buyer paid at the mandi, lot by lot, usually by open auction. It is a wholesale price: before the trader’s margin, transport and the retail mark-up on the way to a shop, and after the mandi’s own fees on the way from the farmer.

The three prices

Minimum is the lowest price any lot of that commodity fetched in that market that day. Maximum is the highest. Modal is the price at which most of the day’s produce was sold — the typical lot, not the average.

The spread between minimum and maximum is mostly quality. Grain with high moisture or foreign matter, fruit that is small or bruised, a variety that buyers in that market do not want: these sell at the minimum. The best lots sell at the maximum. The modal price is where the bulk of ordinary produce changed hands, which is why it is the figure to compare across days and across markets, and why the daily series on this site are built from it.

Two patterns are worth recognising. When minimum, maximum and modal are the same number, usually only one lot or a handful of lots were sold, and the “price” is one buyer’s bid. When the maximum is several times the minimum, the report is probably mixing grades or varieties that should be read separately, or one unusual lot has stretched the range; look at the modal price and the arrivals before drawing a conclusion.

Arrivals

Arrivals are the quantity that came to the market that day. They explain the prices: a day with heavy arrivals and a falling modal price is the harvest reaching the market; a day with tiny arrivals and a jumping price is a thin day, not a trend. A market that reports prices without arrivals, or arrivals of a few quintals, is giving you a weak signal, and this site counts a market’s reports before it builds a series from it.

What the figures are not

The modal price is not what the farmer took home. From the auction price the market deducts its fee and the commission agent’s charge, and the farmer pays for unloading, cleaning and weighing. The modal price is also not what a consumer pays; the retail price in the same town is higher by the trader’s and retailer’s margins and by transport. And it is not a government price: the minimum support price, where one exists, is the price at which government agencies buy, and the mandi price can sit above or below it — the guide on MSP procurement explains why.

How this site reads them

Every mandi page shows each market’s latest report as it came: arrivals, minimum, maximum and modal, with the arrival date it belongs to. Not every market reports every day — markets close on local holidays and some report in bursts — so the date is always beside the price, and a market that has not reported for a while says so.

For a district or a commodity across markets, the daily series takes the median of the modal prices of the markets that reported that day. A median does not move when one market reports an odd lot, which a simple average would. The change shown beside a lot is against that lot’s own previous arrival in the same market, not against another market or another grade. Where a hand-maintained MSP period covers the arrival date, a “Price vs MSP” box shows the difference, with the government release it came from.

None of this is a forecast. It is the day’s trade, reported by the market, republished with its date.