Dept. of Consumer Affairs Hosts Capacity Building Workshop on Price Monitoring of Essential Commodities

The Department of Consumer Affairs recently organised a one-day Capacity Building Workshop on Price Monitoring in New Delhi. The workshop was part of an initiative to broaden the geographic scope of price collection, as well as to improve the quality of price data and analytical output.

The main goal of the Workshop was to educate the State nodal officers on the importance of price data, familiarise them with the methodology for price collection, and plan the upcoming capacity-building workshops for price reporting centres at the zonal/State level.

Rohit Kumar Singh, Secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs, thanked all state representatives for their outstanding work in collecting and reporting price data in his inaugural address. He emphasised the significance of price monitoring, the quality of price data reported, and how the data is used in various policy decisions.

He directed state nodal officers to focus on the accuracy and consistency of the price data. It was also mentioned that having price data collection centres spread across the country would result in better information representation. The Asian Development Bank is providing technical assistance for the PMD upgrade. Krishan Singh Rautela's address highlighted the ADB's assistance and the importance of price monitoring for social protection.

Detailed discussions on the price collection app, challenges in the collection process, tech-enabled data visualisation dashboards, and detailed explanations of the policies were held during the technical sessions with the state nodal officers.

The event concluded with interactions with state nodal officers to answer their questions about department developments, price collection mechanism guidelines, and developing a roadmap for conducting capacity-building workshops in states to build robust price collection mechanisms.

In closing remarks, K Guite, economic advisor, Department of Consumer Affairs, thanked the participants for their tremendous support and contribution in collecting prices from the collection centre, emphasising the importance of data quality.