India's Tobacco Board will launch an electronic auction (e-auction) system on 9 November to regulate sales of Virginia tobacco.

In a project developed in cooperation with Bangalore-based Cranes Software International Limited, to implement an e-auction system using wireless hand-held terminals (HHT), the board envisages everytobacco buyer and board official to participate in the upcoming wireless tobacco bazaar.
“Besides buyers and auction officials, these hand-helds can be used by classifiers — the board officials in charge of inspecting and evaluating the quality of tobacco bales,” explained Asif Mohamed, head of the banking and financial services practice for Cranes Software.
After the classifiers use the HHTs to grade the quality of the tobacco bales, the action shifts to the auction chambers. The auction stage gets underway with the auction superintendent using an HHT. The superintendent selects a particular lot for auction and then a message is flashed on HHTs. The buyer may then decide whether to participate in the auction.
The system verifies the balance amount from the buyer’s bank guarantee and stores it in the HHT, which prior to any further activity, checks whether the bank guarantee is sufficient and displays a warning message in case it is not.
The HHT displays the buyer’s bid price, the current highest bid and target price set by the buyer in the purchase plan. It allows the buyer to then increment the current highest bid value to place his own bid.
“The system can accommodate 5-6 board officials and about 700 buyers, recording transaction volumes of up to 1,500 bales (one bale is roughly 100 kg) per platform each day,” Mohamed added.
The manual system was set up in 1984 to remove the price stranglehold enjoyed by tobacco companies (buyers) on Virginia tobacco sales. While the system has empowered buyers, it did not fully empower growers and it weakened the grower-buyer transactions due to lack of transparency and discrimination. (pi)