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[vasudhaika-kalgudi]

Bottlenecks in Price Discovery Mechanisms

Discovering the right price of an agricultural commodities at right time works as panacea in business. It helps in extracting the maximum profit from deals. Thus for understanding, how actually these people do the price discovery I happened to meet several people across agriculture markets in India.

In those interactions with farmers & agri-traders interestingly, i got several answers like

Receive SMS from a specific Agriculture market yard

Pay and receive SMS for a specific commodities(like Paddy, maize, cotton, etc.,) in predefined markets

Call known people in important markets to understand the prices

Few rely on commodity exchange prices

Use whatsapp to get the information

During a normal working day, they receives bulk of price sms but only 1-2 sms are of their use rest all are junk. it becomes difficult to filter the information important for them. Generally a trader deals with 5-6 commodities in 4-5 locations and the sms he receives is of so many locations and that too include many commodities, thus finding the information of interest becomes very tiresome.

One of the prominent trader told us that, "during the peak arrival season every minute is important, as they deals in very large quantities, a minuscule miss of information can sum up to loss of large money. They don't have time to scan through all the sms, whatsapp to extract the information important to them".

Generally these sources don't give the information they need, for instance suppose i am a agri-trader in Raipur, Chattisgarh, India and wants to sell paddy to trader/exporter in Kakinada,(AP), in this scenario all I need is information about the Kakinada like what is the rate, arrival, but what I receive from these sources is the dumping of sms out of which I have to sort information important to me, Which is very time consuming and irking. Most of the above sources fail to give the information (in this case Kakinada paddy prices) the agri-trader need to take the call over the prices on his own.

Such uninformed deal decision is not considered a good practise to follow. This is where Kalgudi walks in. User receives market prices, (Price of paddy in Kakinada region: goo.gl/RbL8GA) arrivals or required commodity of his location as well as his interested locations on a daily basis in tailored form. These locations can be within India or across the globe so that they can take timely decision.

For more info visit: Kalgudi

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[vasudhaika-kalgudi]

Kalgudi team @ Madanapalle

Madanapalle, a city in Chittoor district. The economy of this city depends mainly on agriculture - major crops include Tomato, Mango, Groundnut and Tamarind. It is the biggest tomato market of Andhra Pradesh.

We visited the market of Madanapalle and found many Commission agents, who helps traders and farmers in storage and transport of the produce. They are more interested in knowing price of commodities in and around the Madanapalle region. When we showed them that they can use @kalgudi to get price of their desired product in desired market, they found it interesting and useful.

Click here to get Price of Tomato in and around Madanapalle: https://goo.gl/4chhVu

The tomatoes from here are traded mostly to Hyderabad, Adilabad, Kamareddy, Chandrapur, Nanded, Madurai, Dindugal, etc. Users were even able to see the prices in and around Hyderabad for Tomatoes: https://goo.gl/Tc9WKJ, they felt happy and started using kalgudi to get the benefit of their business.

[vasudhaika-kalgudi]

Agricultural trade: Language should not be a barrier

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”  ‒Ludwig Wittgenstein

In a multilingual country like India, how people manage to do a trade across the states?

A Phone dealer from Tamil Nadu, wants to buy different phone models from Maharashtra. He orders all his requirements like iphone 6s, Moto G3, Samsung 7S, and his order gets processed and fulfilled easily.

But is it the same case with agricultural products?

A trader in Tamil Nadu has a huge demand for vengayam - வெங்காயம், he advertises his demand through various means. At the same time a trader in Maharashtra is looking for customers to sell his stock of 100 tons of kanda - कांदा. Will they be able to communicate with each other and fulfill their needs?

Wait, what is vengayam and kanda? How does both of them linked to each other? Why a demand of vengayam should be met with the supply of kanda?

This is the problem these agribusinesses face, which the other businesses don't. Vengayam and kanda, both are the local names of Onion. Even though both the traders deal with the same products, they were not able to make a deal because of its different name followed in different region.

Do you know, the various other names of onion?

Onion is known by different names:

Pyaaj in Hindi

Ullipaya in Telugu

Dungali in Gujarati

Irulli in Kannada

Ulli in Malayalam

When single product have these many different names within a country, how is it possible to expand the business across the globe? How many different names will this product have globally? How an agricultural trader can identify his opportunities, and do trade?

Kalgudi, helps traders in handling this problem. Users will be able to see the local name of the product in his local language and also the other commonly known names of the product, along with the picture.

This helps the trader in identifying the correct product without any misunderstanding.

[vasudhaika-kalgudi]

Do some good today

We come across a lot of traders who does trade on a regular basis, buys the produce from farmers, sell it in different locations.

Do you know that the price of these produce changes very frequently within a day in the market?

You see the trend in the price and you want to inform other traders about this trend. Can you contribute it to all the people who are interested in knowing the trend? Are you trying to figure out a way?

Here we go, you can contribute your knowledge on the price and arrival of products or an interesting news that you consider worth sharing, by making a post on “Do some good” in @kalgudi and we help you in spreading the word to the right people and also acknowledge your contribution by adding your name as the source for the news.

Traders who started using @kalgudi find it as an interesting option to increase their visibility and they are sharing the real time price with us to make it as a better place for trader community.