Where our egg rates come from

The source

All prices are published by the National Egg Co-ordination Committee (NECC), an apex body of Indian egg producers. NECC publishes a suggested price for each market it covers, every day. We read it from e2necc.com, NECC’s own daily rate sheet.

We do not survey shops, we do not estimate, and we do not average other websites. If NECC did not publish a number for a market on a given day, we show no number for that day.

The rate is advisory, not a price control

NECC’s prices are suggested. Traders, wholesalers and retailers are free to buy and sell above or below them, and frequently do. Treat the rate as the market’s reference point, not as the price you will be quoted.

Two different series

NECC’s daily sheet actually contains two tables, and they mean different things:

• NECC suggested prices — the advisory rate NECC recommends for that market.
• Prevailing prices — what the market actually traded at.

Most markets appear in one or the other. A few appear in both, which is why we key our archive on the market and the series rather than the market alone — merging them would silently discard one of the two.

What (CC) means

NECC marks some markets with a suffix. (CC) is a consumption centre — a city that mostly eats eggs, like Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru. Markets without it are largely production centres, like Barwala or Namakkal, where eggs are farmed. Production centres are usually cheaper; the gap between the two is roughly the cost of getting eggs across the country.

How often we check

NECC updates its sheet once a day. We check several times each morning and, when a new sheet appears, the site updates within minutes.

Those are two different facts and we keep them apart on purpose. NECC can go quiet for a day while our checks keep running perfectly — collapsing both into a single “updated” line is how a stale number ends up looking fresh.

What happens when something breaks

If a fetch fails, or the sheet arrives in a shape we do not recognise, we write nothing and keep the last known-good data. We would rather show yesterday’s rate, clearly dated, than today’s guess. If the archive falls behind by more than a couple of days, a notice appears at the top of every rate page instead of the site quietly implying the old number is current.

Retail prices

NECC publishes wholesale rates only. Retail typically runs 5–8% higher — this is an estimate, not a measured shop price. Where we show a retail figure it is always a range, never a single number, because we are inferring it rather than observing it.

The archive

We hold NECC’s daily rates back to 2009 — around 199,000 daily prices covering essentially every calendar day since then, including markets NECC has since stopped publishing. That history is what makes the charts and the seasonal averages on each city page possible.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with NECC’s sheet, that is a bug and we want to know. Please tell us which market and which date, and we will fix it and say what went wrong.