Now that the price of vegetables has shot through the roof, with onions coming at a whopping Rs 80 per kilogram in Delhi and only a little lower in the rest of the country, the Congress-led UPA Government has woken from its slumber and promised to act.
Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution KV Thomas has assured that the regime would step in to contain the price. “I will find some solution to it”, he has said. What that solution will be, remains to be seen. But the question is: Why has the Government waited for the crisis to assume such an alarming proportionIJ The prices didn't go up overnight but crept to the present level over the last few weeks. The Union Government ought to have intervened earlier, coordinated a strategy with the State Governments and its own agencies concerned and seen to it that the supply side of the commodity was not disrupted. From all accounts, it's the supply end that has contributed the most to the rising prices. Onions and some green vegetables which have become expensive are in short supply in the wholesale markets, apparently because heavy rains across the vegetable-growing belt in the country destroyed the produce.
That may be so, but again the Government ought to have seen it coming. The other reason for the crisis is that unscrupulous traders, seeing the writing on the wall much before the Government spotted it, had begun hoarding and are now offloading at exorbitant rates. But, even if one takes into account the destruction of the vegetable crop, especially onions, because of heavy rainfall, it alone should not have hurt this badly. After all, the demand has not soared much higher than what it was earlier, say, last year. The argument that we can control the price of onions by cutting down its export may be a tempting idea. But the fact is that such a move could make only a marginal difference. Given the high prices, onions exported from India are in any case not everyone's favourite offshore. The product is being edged out of international markets because it cannot compete with far lower-priced onions from China and Pakistan (reportedly being sold at Rs 15 to Rs 20 per kg).
The irony in the midst of the shortage and the zooming prices is that there is actually a glut in the market. Potato production in the country is at a high, yet this staple vegetable is priced higher than before. This brings us to the issue of storage. It has been known for some time now that tonnes of vegetable, including potato, go waste because of the poor storage that Government facilities offer. Farmers have to often rely on private warehouses that are relatively expensive. Moreover, the private storage facilities are not widely spread. And to compound the problem, only a small fraction of the warehousing facilities is available for vegetables; most of the space is consumed by food grains.The vegetable story is the same that we come across in the case of food grains; despite bumper crops, there is food scarcity and the poor go hungry. Finally, there is another irony in the vegetable saga: India is the world's second largest producer of vegetables. Something is going seriously wrong if, despite this, the people of the country are made to pay through their nose for potatoes, onions and tomatoes.