Auctionhouse. What the state is selling.
Every working day the Government of India puts thousands of lots on the open market through MSTC Limited — the public-sector e-auction platform that handles surplus, disposal, and confiscated-goods sales for the Ministries, the Railways, defence-PSU yards, port trusts, customs warehouses, and the central banks of seized metal. Most of it goes through quietly. This register watches the ones that don’t.
Currently a placeholder. The backend — a daily ingest of MSTC’s published catalogues, deduplicated and indexed against close dates — is in development. When it lands, the register fills in below.
Methodology
- 01
Ingest
A daily crawl of MSTC’s published catalogue pages and the supporting tender notices. Each lot is captured once with provenance — URL, snapshot, fetched-at timestamp.
- 02
Normalise
Lots are mapped to a single schema: selling agency, category, location, reserve price, EMD, start, close. Free-text item descriptions stay verbatim. No translation, no rewriting.
- 03
Register
The register is the public output. Filterable by category and agency; sorted by close date; closed lots retained for the record with their hammer outcomes where MSTC publishes them.
- 04
Annotate
A small subset of lots gets a written note — what’s being sold, why it’s interesting, what the close attracted. Hand-written, infrequent, opinionated.
Schema preview
The shape of a future entry. Once the backend is live, this register will fill with real rows pulled straight from MSTC overnight.
Lot title appears here
- Selling agency
- Selling agency
- Category
- Category
- Location
- Location · State
- Reserve
- Reserve price
- EMD
- Earnest money deposit
- Opens
- Start date
- Closes
- Close date
Primary sources
- MSTC Limited
- mstcindia.co.in — the Government of India’s e-auction platform for surplus, disposal, scrap, and confiscated goods. The primary ingest target.
- DGS&D / GeM
- The Government e-Marketplace handles procurement, not auctions, so it is out of scope here. Cross-referenced when an MSTC lot is the upstream consequence of a GeM procurement decision.
- Selling agency catalogues
- Railway divisions, defence PSUs, port trusts, central PSU mills and refineries each publish their own catalogues alongside the MSTC listing. Used to verify lot composition and condition.
The register tracks what is publicly listed on MSTC. It does not predict outcomes, advise on bidding, or represent any seller or buyer. The intent is the same as the rest of nl06: watch a running system, write down what it does.