No more tears! Tamil Nadu to sell onions at Rs 55 per kilo
The move is aimed to control the hike in onion price
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-09-03 05:26 GMT
Chennai: Tamil Nadu government on Wednesday announced that it was procuring onion from Karnataka and Maharashtra to be sold at Rs 55 per kilogram at 42 state run farm fresh outlets, as against the market rate of Rs 70 per kg.
An official press release said that based on the instructions from Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa additional loads of the vegetable from Yeshwantpur in Karnataka and Lasalgaon in Maharashtra were bought for sales in and around Chennai.
The move is aimed to control the hike in onion price and help people to purchase the vegetable at a lower rate. The government said due to change in the climatic conditions, onion cultivation had come down creating a high demand in the market.
To shield the public from price rise, the Chief Minister had already allocated a Rs 100 crore corpus to control prices of essential commodities. Tamil Nadu had already made similar initiatives to control prices of onion in 2013 and dhal in 2014, the release said.
“The move would help the public, but the traders will not be hit as there is a huge demand for onions due to lack of stock,” said J. Vinayagam, a vegetable vendor at Koyambedu. “Some traders do hoard onions to create an artificial demand so that prices can be hiked for short term gains. If the government raids those hoarding onions, prices will come down further,” said another retailer seeking anonymity.