It is difficult to fathom the reasons and one is also clueless as to why the government is not taking adequate measures to spare the common man of such “annual rituals”. The stock answer we usually get is that in an event of drought, prices shoot up and if it is a bountiful monsoon, prices again go up as crops are either damaged or there is disruption in transportation. In any case, the consumer is the loser. Thus the government has one or the other reason to justify the price increases. At the same time no action is taken to combat the price increase and therefore we continue to hear the same excuses year in and year out. The indexed vegetables for inflation in the Indian context is onion, potato and tomato in that order which through the year see wild swings in prices. One would assume that in the vegetable CPI these Three Musketeers would play a major role. It would not seem impossible therefore to conceive that governments in order to limit the rise in CPI may remove these infamous Three and replace them with say pumpkin, cabbage and ghia – bottle gourd which are relatively stable in price. In certain areas of the country, the Centre is making all the right noises of holding an Inter-Ministerial meeting and also a meeting of the State Ministers responsible for agriculture. But will anything come out of this except for pious statements that hoarding should be stopped or prices should be regulated. The reason for this is that the Centre is just going through the motions of these initiatives since control of hoarding or price regulation for items, in this case vegetables, is a State subject. Vegetable happens to be the neglected items in our agriculture basket while across India it is the nourishing item in the common man’s diet and with fish and meat beyond the affordance limit of the common man, it is vegetables that he looks to for nutrition. Will the government at least now take concrete steps to increase the availability of vegetables across the country so that it can figure on the aam aadmi’s thali?
Ouch! Veggies are too hot
Vegetable prices have hit the roof again.
