Empanelled polling participants

Somebody has to tell the exchange what a commodity is actually selling for in mandis and markets around the country. That job falls to a defined panel of traders and users — not the general public, and not any one trader alone.

These are the empanelled polling participants. The exchange chooses who is on the panel, reviews it periodically, and can add active members or drop inactive ones.

Spot prices are collected from empanelled polling participants comprising traders and users of the particular commodity, across different centres in the country. Exchanges regularly review the panel to strengthen the polling process — adding active participants and removing inactive ones.

SEBI's regulatory guidelines require exchanges to disclose several things about this process: the mechanism of spot price polling, how prices are arrived at, whether the disclosed prices include or exclude taxes and levies, whether polling has been outsourced to an agency (and if so, the details), the criteria used to select polling participants, and any other information useful for transparency. On the NCDEX platform, polled prices are disclosed twice daily — once around 1:30 pm and again around 4:00–5:00 pm.

NCDEX maintains a panel of soybean traders and processors across Indore, Kota and other mandi centres for its soybean spot polling. Each is registered, or empanelled, specifically for this purpose — a trader who is active in the market but not on the panel cannot contribute a polled price.

Suppose one long-standing participant in Kota stops actively trading soybean and its quotes become stale or unrepresentative. NCDEX reviews the panel periodically and can remove that participant, replacing it with a more active mandi trader — keeping the twice-daily polled price, published at 1:30 pm and again at 4:00–5:00 pm, representative of the real market rather than of a fixed historical list.

Chapter 3, section 3.10, introduces empanelled polling participants as the source of the raw data that bootstrapping then cleans into a single spot polling price. Expect a question on who is on the panel (traders and users, not the general public) and on the twice-daily NCDEX disclosure timings.

• The panel is reviewed and changed over time — it is not a permanently fixed list. Adding active and removing inactive participants is an explicit part of the process.
• Disclosure of selection criteria is a SEBI regulatory requirement, not a voluntary exchange practice — exchanges must publish how participants are chosen.
• Empanelled polling participants feed ex-warehouse prices for agricultural commodities — these are inclusive of Mandi Cess but exclusive of GST, a distinction candidates often miss when reading the polled figures.