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Informist, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025

 

By J. Navya Sruthi

 

MUMBAI – The Food Corp. of India sold 925,000 tonnes of rice as of Thursday through auctions under the open market sale scheme for 2025-26 (Apr–Mar), data from the agency showed. To offload surplus rice, FCI is holding auctions twice a week, on Wednesday and Thursday. 

 

Last week, FCI offered 287,000 tonnes of rice, of which 159,000 tonnes were offered in Wednesday's auction and 128,000 tonnes on Thursday. However, the offtake of the grain remained poor, at only 60,000 tonnes--32,000 tonnes Wednesday and 28,000 tonnes Thursday. The FCI is offering around 100,000-160,000 tonnes of rice at each auction, but sales remain poor at only 15,000-32,000 tonnes, data showed.  

 

Demand for rice has been poor amid comfortable availabilty of the grain across the country. This has been the case with rice sales in local markets too. Market participants see this situation persisting in the near term on the back of prospects of higher rice production in the ongoing kharif season amid higher paddy acreage. According to data released by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, paddy acreage rose nearly 2% on year to 43.9 million hectares. 

 

Meanwhile, rice stocks in the central pool as of Sept. 1 were nearly 3% lower on month and up over 14% on year at 36.9 million tonnes. The current rice stocks are at a two-decade high for September. It is also significantly above the buffer norm of 13.54 million tonnes--operational stock of 11.54 million tonnes and strategic reserve of 2.00 million tonnes.

 

In addition to rising paddy cultivation amid incentives like high minimum support prices and additional state bonuses for the grain, the government has also been grappling with surplus rice stocks due to its open-ended policy. However, FCI has been struggling to sell what it procured. 

 

For the upcoming kharif marketing season 2025-26 (Oct-Sept), the government has set a rice procurement target of 46.35 million tonnes of rice, slightly lower than 48.5 million tonnes for the 2024-25 season.  End

 

With inputs from Afra Abubacker

Edited by Tanima Banerjee

 

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