Throughout history, onions have been considered as a natural cure for many ailments.
It acts as a natural decongestant. My maternal grandmother used to sprinkle sugar on sliced onions and keep it overnight and use its juice as a remedy for cough. The onion’s rising price turned into a bomb and shook governments in the past; now, many fear history may repeat itself.
Onions are now sold at a huge price. What we are witnessing today is a refutation of Newton’s law of gravity which says that everything that goes up must eventually come down; alas, prices of onions that have shot up monstrously; show no signs of coming back to earth again.
The cause of the price rise is due to excessive rainfall that has brought about low production and has pushed onion prices to nearly Rs 100/kg in many places. Onions have become a “luxury of special type.” The poor victims can’t even approach the local sale counters to purchase it, because of its sky-rocketing prices. Only the moneyed individuals can absorb the shock of its fancy cost; in smaller road-side joints onions ‘boje’ are making a vanishing act, only its past taste lingers on the tongue. Some locals purchase large quantity anticipating that its cost will still rise heartlessly. Nowadays, everything seems to be expensive; and the contents of my wallet and that of average consumers are shrinking in terms of provisioning the household.
I feel that this Herculean price didn’t profit the farmers as they were forced to sells onions at a lower cost to the traders as they do not have enough storage facility like wholesalers; so this mighty price only benefits the traders who make a huge profit and these poor onion cultivators who are suppressed and exploited by others in any ways have made others richer than themselves. These growers got the pecuniary pittance and the wholesalers with their wrong deed of cruelly inflating its price get monetary abundance.
If the cause of price rise of onions was due to artificial shortage created by hoarders, government would lose no time to crack down on them to prevent such man-made scarcity of this sensitive commodity. But as the shortage of onion is not artificial but natural which is caused by the vagaries of weather; many locals feel that the agriculture minister doesn’t know what to do about fearful onion prices. According to them, perhaps, even the prime minister doesn’t know what to do about dolorous onion prices which are like a dagger in the breast of the poor. If ministers knew, then onion price would not have risen to the skies; for they would have addressed it with a sense of urgency.
But ancient Indian wisdom knows how to check the upward graph of onion price; and that is by — voluntary stopping the use of onion as an ingredient in their cooking. If millions stop utilising onions in their cooking, it would be a collective action that would drastically reduce its demand; thereby the price of good quality onions would slip and slide down, or create a supply-side surplus which could be exported to wiping out the country’s fiscal deficit and put a brake on inflation trends. It would cause a ripple effect and would be a peaceful and tolerant way by which the onion heartache would vanish.
