The Department of Consumer Affairs has directed NCCF and Nafed to sell tomatoes at a retail price of Rs 50 per kg from August 15, 2023. This decision has been taken by the department in view of the fall in the prices of tomatoes in the wholesale markets.

Retail sale of tomatoes in Delhi-NCR by NCCF and Nafed started from 14 July 2023. A total of 15 lakh kg of tomatoes were procured by both the agencies in August, 2023 till August 13, 2023, which were provided to retail consumers at major tomato consumption centers in the country. These locations include Delhi-NCR, Rajasthan (Jaipur, Kota), Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Prayagraj) and Bihar (Patna, Muzaffarpur, Arrah, Buxar).

The retail price of tomatoes procured by NCCF and Nafed was initially fixed at Rs 90 per kg and was later reduced to Rs 80 per kg from July 16 and Rs 70 per kg from July 20. Now the prices of tomatoes have been reduced to Rs 50 per kg. This will obviously give relief to the consumers.

In the last few days, NCCF has significantly increased the quantity of tomatoes supplied to retail consumers by deploying its mobile vans at 70 locations across Delhi and 15 locations in Noida and Greater Noida. Apart from this, NCCF is also continuously doing retail sale of tomatoes through Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform.

It is noteworthy that on the instructions of the Department of Consumer Affairs, NCCF and NAFED had started procuring tomatoes from the mandis of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. It was made available to consumers in areas where tomato prices had recorded the highest increase during the last one month.