MUMBAI, 16 June 2020: India's leading agricultural commodity Exchange, National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX) has launched two national-level rainfall-based indices that would track the systematic rainfall movement in the country – the Indian Monsoon Index (Cumulative Monsoon Index) and Indian Rain Index (Monthly Cumulative Rainfall Index).
NCDEX has partnered with Skymet Weather Services Private Limited, which will provide data on the weather movement in the country. The two indices will only be representative indices of rainfall in the country and won’t be available for trading.
Announcing the partnership, NCDEX managing director & CEO Vijay Kumar said, “In a country like India, where the fate of agriculture largely hangs on the performance of monsoon, the related uncertainty hurts not only the agrarian community, but businesses too for the simple reason that around 60 percent of the consumers still live in the rural areas. Therefore, need of a tool which could be used by entire value chain to track weather movements has been felt since long.”
“The monsoon-based indices, being launched by NCDEX, will fulfil this need. The accurate and reliable rainfall data provided by Skymet through their massive pan-India network of Automatic Weather Stations will be a great boost to help our agriculture value chain and can be used as a hedging tool to mitigate their risks,” Kumar stressed.
Jatin Singh, MD & Founder, Skymet Weather Services Pvt. Ltd. said, “Skymet was launched in 2003 keeping in mind the needs of people and that they should be able to get a dependable weather data at their fingertips. Agriculture contributes significantly to Indian economy contributing 14% to its GDP and 80% of small and marginalised farmers largely depends on the monsoon rains. Southwest monsoon in India is a four-month-long affair from June till September and more than 75% of India’s annual rainfall occurs during this period itself. Good rains during the season result in bountiful crops which further benefit the farmers.”
The two indices will cover rainfall on pan-India basis using state-of-the-art rainfall data collection centres. This would track rainfall on the basis of deviation from normal (deficit/surplus) for which yearly cumulative and monthly statistics are available. The data updation would be on daily basis.
These indices will be useful for a broad range of economic sectors such as energy, agriculture, insurance, banking, construction, entertainment, leisure, travel, retail, etc. This will certainly prove to be beneficial for farmers, businesses, government institutions, etc. It will also be useful to promote new insurance / derivatives products for sectors that are dependent on weather, such as agriculture.
Kapil Dev, EVP & Head – Products and Business Development said, “We recently launched AGRIDEX, which is the first agri-commodities Futures Index in India. Now, with another first in rainfall tracking at country level, we feel immensely proud. NCDEX has always taken lead to offer innovative products in Indian agriculture ecosystem and Monsoon-based Index promises to keep up with the tradition.”
NCDEX is an agricultural commodity Exchange in India, which offers services across the entire value-chain of agricultural commodities.
Whereas, Skymet Weather is India’s leading weather and agri-risk monitoring company aiming to help small and marginalised farmers by mitigating risks associated with agriculture through the use of IoT, SaSS (software as a smart solution) and DaaS (Data as a Services).
