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.
Scored nightly against four axes: arbitrage (a deal that exceeds the reserve), niche-instrument (a tool that rarely surfaces), prestige-seller (the seller is the story), and curio (the object is the story). The editorial floor differs by axis — arbitrage needs to be a real deal (7+/10); prestige and curio surface earlier (4+). Anything from a prestige seller (DRDO, ISRO, CSIR, HAL, academic) also surfaces at 4+ regardless of category fit.
The register
The register is open. No lots currently clear the editorial floor.
The pipeline ran at . It tracks 40 active lots across MSTC’s twenty regional offices, and has scored 40 of them. The highest-scoring active lot today is 3/10. New lots arrive nightly; the lowest editorial floor is 4/10 (prestige & curio).
Methodology
- 01
Ingest
A nightly crawl of MSTC’s catalogue pages across all twenty regional offices. Each auction 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. Annexures — the per-lot detail PDFs MSTC publishes alongside the catalogue — are fetched and excerpted.
- 03
Score
Every lot is scored 1–10 against four categories: arbitrage, niche-instrument, prestige-seller, curio. The editorial floor is per-category, not uniform — arbitrage must be a real deal; prestige and curio surface earlier. Anything from a prestige seller is included regardless of category fit.
- 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.
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.