Kolkata: The Office of the Jute Commissioner on Wednesday withdrew, with immediate effect, the raw jute stock control order that had governed the fibre trade for over nine months, removing holding limits on traders, balers and mills as the 2026-27 jute year begins amid expectations of a much larger crop.
In a notification issued on Wednesday, the Jute Commissioner's office withdrew the entire chain of orders issued on stock.
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The orders had directed raw jute balers, traders, dealers, agencies and stockists to maintain a nil stock, and barred jute mills and manufacturing units from holding raw jute stock beyond 45 days' consumption.
"In view of the start of the new jute season and after considering the expected market scenario for raw jute, I ... hereby withdraw the afore-mentioned notifications with immediate effect," the deputy jute commissioner said.
The controls were imposed during a season of acute scarcity, with raw jute prices climbing to around Rs 19,000 a quintal in 2025-26 - more than three times the minimum support price of Rs 5,925 - as mills struggled with a crop that fell well short of official projections.
Advance estimates had pegged the crop at 75-95 lakh bales, but the market ultimately absorbed only about 52 lakh bales, according to industry estimates.
At a meeting of the Expert Committee on Jute on July 2, Agriculture Department officials declined to revise their earlier figures and asked the industry to account for around 30 lakh bales of apparently missing fibre.
Mill owners have maintained the fibre was never hoarded, arguing that a year of stringent stock control - with nil limits, mandatory declarations on the Jute SMART portal and physical inspections - failed to uncover any hidden stock.
They attributed part of the gap to an uncorrected stale carryover figure, and the larger part to the conversion of satellite-measured acreage into mill-usable fibre, a method they said overstated actual availability.
The first satellite estimate by the National Remote Sensing Centre put jute area at 5.82 lakh hectares, about 21 per cent higher than last year and the sharpest single-year rise in the current series, with the biggest gains in Murshidabad and Nadia districts, where prices had risen the most.
Forward prices for August delivery have already fallen from around Rs 19,000 to Rs 12,000 a quintal, even as physical arrivals remain thin due to the harvest cycle and a retting process that takes two to three weeks.
Indian Jute Mills sources said arrivals are expected to peak between September and November.
The withdrawal restores traders' ability to hold and aggregate stock as the new crop arrives, while allowing mills, several of which had remained shut during the lean months, to carry working stock again.
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A separate notice issued on July 7 mandates mills to upload purchase orders and mill receipts daily and file monthly returns through an upgraded Jute SMART portal, giving the Commissioner's office real-time visibility of the pipeline even after the holding caps were lifted.
