Agricultural Commodity Futures: Searching for Potential Winners

This paper forms a part of the study, ‘Agricultural Markets in India’, supported by NCDEX Investor (Client) Protection Fund Trust. A draft version of this was presented to the Board of Directors of NCDEX in its Strategy meeting, and we are extremely grateful to the Board, especially Chairman Mr Rabi Narayan Das, for his kind words of appreciation, comments and suggestions. We also gratefully acknowledge the help we received from NCDEX-Team,
especially Samir Shah, Nidhi Nath Srinivas (now with BMGF), Aleen Mukherjee, Avinash Mohan, Abhishek Govilkar and Niraj Shukla. They helped us throughout the study from collating relevant information to its analysis and commenting on the draft of the study. We also sincerely thank our external reviewers- Prof. Gopal Naik (IIM Bangalore) and Sanjay Kaul (NCML) for critically reviewing an earlier draft of the paper and giving us very
constructive feedback, which has helped in enriching the paper. We appreciate the insights that Siraj Chaudhry (Cargill) shared with us on agricultural futures markets. Neharika Sobti was associated with the study in its earlier stages and we also thank her for her input. And finally, we would also like to thank all the members of Agriculture team at ICRIER for their suggestions and comments when it was presented in an in-house seminar. Needless to say, the responsibility of facts, figures, analysis and views expressed in this paper fully rests with the authors.