MARGAO: Welcome to Gandhi market, the commercial capital’s biggest Margao Municipal-owned vegetable market. It’s considered a market for cheap and fresh vegetables as evident by the fact that even the advent of the Horticulture Corporation stalls dotting the city and Salcete’s country-side had in no way reduced Gandhi market’s importance as the vegetable hub.
Gandhi market, however, seemed to have not escaped the volatility confronting the common man’s onion. Here, the onion rate is dependent on the wholesale market rate prevailing in Belagavi and markets in neighbouring Karnataka. Wholesalers, traders and retailers offer the item for sale as per the rate prevailing in the neighbouring state.
When The Goan team visited the market on Saturday morning to the vegetable yard owned by K R Traders, onions were missing. Reason: Whatever supplies the wholesaler had procured from Belagavi was sold like hotcakes at a wholesale rate of Rs 80 per kg. The onion stock was all empty by 10 am, and the less fortunate customers, who could not lay their hands on onions, returned home with concern as news spread that the wholesale price of onion in the Belagavi market has touched a Rs 100-mark on Saturday.
“Prices of onion have not been stable for the last fortnight or so. We get our stock from Belagavi and the rates, both wholesale and retail, depend on the rates there,” a vegetable vendor Vinayak said.
Vinayak has sold onion at the rate of Rs 80 per kg in the Gandhi market, but there were other traders, mostly retail, who were selling onions at Rs 90-100 a kg.
Both wholesale and retail traders pointed out that the price of onion had touched the Rs 140-150-mark per kg in the market over a week ago.
Unlike the recent past, one can now come across onions at the shelves of the Gandhi market vegetable vendors. Madgavkars in particular and Saxttikars in general will have to, however, contend with the volatility confronting the onion, at least in the coming days with the rates dependent on the supply in the Belagavi and other markets in the neighbouring states.
