The Centre has instructed the National Cooperative Consumers’ Federation (NCCF) and the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation (NAFED) to sell tomatoes at a retail price of Rs 50 a kg from August 15, 2023, due to the decrease in tomato prices in wholesale markets. The direction has been issued by the Department of Consumer Affairs.
Retail tomato sales began in the Delhi-NCR region on July 14, 2023. As of August 13, 2023, a total of 15 lakh kg of tomatoes had been procured by these two agencies.
These tomatoes are being continuously distributed to retail consumers in major consumption centres across the country, including Delhi-NCR, Rajasthan (Jaipur, Kota), Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Prayagraj), and Bihar (Patna, Muzaffarpur, Arrah, Buxar).
Initially, the retail price of tomatoes procured by NCCF and NAFED was set at Rs 90 per kg.
This was later reduced to Rs 80 per kg on July 16, 2023, and then further lowered to Rs 70 per kg from July 20, 2023.
Recently, NCCF significantly increased the tomato supply to retail consumers by deploying mobile vans to 70 locations in Delhi and 15 locations in Noida and Greater Noida.
Additionally, NCCF is also conducting retail sales of tomatoes through the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform.
As directed by the Department of Consumer Affairs, NCCF and NAFED had initiated tomato procurement from markets in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra.
The aim was to simultaneously distribute them in major consumption centers where retail prices had experienced the most significant increase in the last month.