Price of perishables may come down by Tuesday in Kolkata

KOLKATA: Though cyclone Fani spared Kolkata of large-scale devastation, it turned perishable commodities in the city markets expensive. Market sources, however, assured that this was a temporary situation and the prices should swing back to the normal range by Tuesday.
After Fani, the price of fish has gone through the roof. The rise is the steepest in recent times — most of the varieties have become dearer by Rs 100-Rs 150.“Such rise in a span of 48 hours in unprecedented,” said Shankar Malakar of Bengal Fish Merchant Association.

Comparatively, the rise in vegetable prices, though enough to affect buyers, has not been that steep. “The sharp hike is engineered by retailers as there is a nominal rise in the wholesale vegetable price,” said Kamal De, president of West Bengal Vegetable Vendors’ Association.
“The impact of Fani on vegetable prices is temporary. It has more to do with the market’s miscalculation than a real impact on the supply. On Thursday and Friday, the retailers and wholesalers stockpiled their normal quota, but on Friday and Saturday, the markets hardly had customers. Now the retailers are trying to make up for their losses by hiking the prices when people swarmed the markets on Sunday,” said De.
“There are two major reasons why the fish price rose so sharply. Because of Fani, fishing trawlers could not venture out and the supply from Andhra Pradesh and Odisha was snapped because of the large-scale devastation in Odisha. However, immediately after Fani passed, the road infrastructure was cleared of all obstacles on a war footing. So once the supply resumes, prices are expected to normalize,” said a source.
The cyclone has ruptured the fish supply from Malancha and other areas of South 24 Parganas as well, leaving a yawning gap between demand and supply. Samir Biswas, a fish vendor at Kasba market, said, “The prices of pabda and pomfret have risen by Rs 150 per kilo, mainly due to the demand-supply mismatch.”
To deal with the fish-price hike, middle-class consumers have switched to eggs. “Egg consumption has found an unusual surge post Fani and the price dipped under Rs 5 per piece for the first time this year,” said Behala egg trader Barun Das.
Retired government employee Sushanto Banerjee said, “Due to the unusual hike in fish price, we’ve switched to eggs.”