"Mandi price data" and "APMC data" get used interchangeably, but if you're building something with it — a dashboard, a farmer advisory tool, a research project — it helps to know exactly what's in the data and how it's structured before you start writing queries.

What is an APMC mandi?

An APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) mandi is a regulated wholesale market where farmers sell crops to traders/buyers under state oversight, originally set up so farmers wouldn't be at the mercy of unregulated middlemen. Each state runs its own network of these markets — Maharashtra alone has hundreds. Prices are recorded per market, per commodity, per day.

How the price data is structured

Each daily record is effectively a row of:

  • State and Market (the specific mandi, e.g. "Pune" or "Nagpur")
  • Commodity and often a variety (e.g. Onion — "Local" vs "Nasik Red")
  • Min price, Max price, and Modal price — the modal price (most frequently traded price that day) is usually what people mean by "the price"
  • Arrival date — the date the produce arrived at the mandi, not always the same as when it was recorded

Where the data comes from

The authoritative source is the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare's Agmarknet portal, which is also mirrored on data.gov.in. Agmarknet covers over 3,000 regulated markets nationwide across 200+ commodities. Academic platforms like CEDA Agri Market Data also republish it in analysis-friendly form.

Querying it programmatically

Going straight to source means registering for a data.gov.in API key and handling the raw field format. For a quicker path — currently scoped to Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka — Mandi Price API gives you the same underlying data as clean, keyless JSON:

curl -X GET "https://mandi-api.onrender.com/v1/prices/history?state=Punjab&commodity=Wheat&market=Ludhiana" \ -H "Accept: application/json"

Common use cases

  • Price trend dashboards — charting modal price over time per commodity/market
  • Farmer advisory tools — surfacing the best current market/day to sell a given crop
  • Market research & trading — spotting price divergence between mandis for arbitrage or procurement planning
  • Academic & policy research — studying price volatility, MSP effectiveness, or regional supply patterns

For the specific pain points of the official API (registration, inconsistent fields, pagination) and how a keyless alternative sidesteps them, see Agmarknet API Alternative. For a direct side-by-side with real requests, see data.gov.in vs. a Simpler Alternative.

Full endpoint reference: docs. Try it live: playground.