Cash crunch: Sellers slash prices to sell off veggies

PATNA: With Raja, Sudhir, Lalu and Devanti sitting idle awaiting buyers of their veggies, city’s Antaghat Market was on Thursday devoid of the usual rush or haggling for prices.
Vendors blame it on the Centre’s recent demonetisation exercise. For, theirs is a business mainly involving cash that has gone scarce since November 8 when PM Narendra Modi announced scrapping of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes and banks and ATMs subsequently failed to replace them with new notes “sufficiently”.
With the demand falling, the veggie vendors have slashed prices. Many of them have even asked farmers not to send their produce to the market any more.
“Sold at Rs 30/kg a few weeks ago, potato is now available for Rs 22/per kg. Brinjal prices have dipped from Rs 40 to Rs 30/kg and those of carots from Rs 80 to Rs 60/kg,” Sushil Kumar Yadav, a seller at the wholesale vegetable mandi, said, exasperation seeping through his voice.
Raj Kumari, who sells veggies on Boring Road, attributed the price fall to glut. “My business has seen a drop of three-fourths in the last two weeks. I try to exhaust the stocks every day selling them even at throwaway prices as taking them back home will prove to be a bigger loss,” said the woman in her late 40s who claimed to have ended up selling onions, cabbages and cauliflowers at Rs 15/kg last night,
Quite a few of these vendors are hardly left with any small-denomination notes. “I have been selling vegetables in Machhua Toli for a decade, but never before did I see such difficult times. The government did not think about the poor like us when it set out to take and implement the decision,” Shyam, who claimed to have lost almost 70% of his business in the past few days, rued, adding the government and its banks were just not capable to replace the scrapped notes with new ones.
Not that homemakers are happy. “At times, I cook ‘rajma’ in place of veggies. My husband doesn’t mind for we do not have small notes for household expenses and I do not want to spend the Rs 100 notes on things that can be avoided,” said Boring Road’s Neelam Sundram whose husband gave her 20 notes of Rs 100 a few days ago.
Fruit sellers also rue their lot
City fruit vendors narrated similar tales of woes. Saifi, who usually earns between Rs 1,200 and Rs 1,500 daily, claims an 85% decline in fruit sales in two weeks. “Many a time, I have no option but to accept old notes so that ‘dhandha-paani chalta rahe’,” the 24-year-old told TOI on Thursday.
Sunny, who runs a fruit shop near the Income Tax roundabout, showed fruits that he claimed were “lying unsold for several days now”. “Since wedding season is on, prices of apples, oranges, guavas and grapes have not gone down. But their demand has dipped drastically. Many of my customers even cancelled bulk orders due to cash crunch,” he said.