In view of the 540 operational Sugar Mills in India, there are large number of institutional buyers besides wholesalers and sugar agents, the e-commerce platform Indian Sugar eMarket (ISeM) launched here by Shri Ravikant, IAS, Secretary, Department of Food & Public Distribution, Ministry of Consumer Affairs in the presence of S/Shri Gaurav Goel, President, ISMA, Rajesh Sinha, Managing Director & CEO, Adhir jha, Managing Director & CEO, ISEC. Large number of the Buyers and Sellers(Sugar Mills Owner) witnessed the launch of the e Platform for Sugar & Allied Products.
The Indian domestic market for sugar is the largest in the world at over 25 million tonnes. To align the sugar market with advancement in technology and the `Digital India` initiatives, the Indian Sugar Exim Corporation Limited (ISEC), a body jointly promoted by the National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories Limited (NFCSF) and the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) and NCDEX eMarket Limited (NeML) have developed an online platform named as ISeM - Indian Sugar eMarket.
The ISeM platform attempts to integrate the sugar market at a national level and provide better selling options to the sugar mils while also provide more competitive rates to the buyers. This e-plateform is a step towards establishing a stable spot market for sugar and allied products which can serve as a base for the development of a vibrant future market in sugar to related by products, including molasses, ethanol and bagasse as well as facilitating the purchase of consumables by the sugar mills.
The e-commerce platform would provide for trade options on continued market basis as also forward and reverse options as per the requirements of the buyer or the seller.
Besides better price discovery, the market would result in transparency of operations and ease of settlement of post trade formalities.
Sugar has been an important commodity historically due to a variety of factors, including the human appetite for sweet foods and drinks, the complementarily that sugar brings to the other flavors in food, its preservation and fermentation properties, and the calories it provides. Sugar (or more precisely sucrose) was first prepared in India.
It was brought back to the Western world by the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great in 325 BCE. Trade in sugar was further expanded in the Mediterranean region by the Arab conquest of the sixth century CE. Improvements in the crystallization process expanded the sugar trade (especially in the form of molasses) in the twelfth century. However, the limited supply of sugar in the international market caused refined sugar to be relatively costly until the production of sugar by European colonies in the Americas grew after 1700. This expansion, coupled with improvements in refining technologies that reduced unwanted tastes in the sweetener, caused sugar to replace other sweeteners such as honey, becoming the dominant sweetener over time. While demand for sugar remained relatively unaffected by the introduction of non-nutritive sweeteners, in the early twenty-first century the dominance has been challenged. For sale in the market in view of the Digital India the e-commerce platform has resulted in ISeM.
