Coloured lights keeping vegetable buyers in dark

CHANDIGARH: Vendors are using coloured portable worklights to hide the true shade and quality of fruits and

vegetables

from customers. Complaints have come in from different part of the city.

The street vendors are being accused of tricking the customers.

Shekhar Agarwal

of Sector 19 said: “The vendors put up harsh green light over green vegetables so that it becomes impossible for us to know the colour. Last time, it tricked me into buying lady’s fingers that turned out to be stale”.

Sector 21 resident Rakesh Batra said: “This kind of cheating is going on at the Sector-26 vegetable market as well. An entire row of vendors has jade light over green vegetables, yellow light over banana, and red over apple.

The practice is so common that buyers are surprised why the vendors haven’t been caught. Senior citizens, most often the victims, have also expressed their concern.

H S Jagdev

, a retired professor from Sector 15, said: “Forget about checking the quality of the vegetable, one cannot even count the currency in that light. I ended up paying Rs 100 instead of Rs 50 once.”

Taking up the issue, mayor

Asha Jaswal

has written to the senior superintendent of police (SSP) to check the menace. Our eyes can't individually detect the presence or absence of all the colours in-between red, green and blue. We have three types of colour sensor in our eyes and if we fire actual white light at them, they're all activated, and we see white.