A street vendor who peddles spicy snacks, Sanjeet Kumar camps out in the same spot every day near the scenic Dal Lake in Srinagar, on the Indian side of Kashmir. The snacks, known as bhelpuri, consist of puffed rice, tangy tamarind sauce and chopped tomatoes. But they get their zing from freshly diced onions sprinkled with black salt.
Over the past two months, it has become more expensive for Kumar (right, photo by Ahmer Khan) to prepare those delicious nibbles because the price of onions has more than tripled across India, climbing from 30 cents to more than $1 per kilogram in stores. The hike has sparked a national outcry and taken a hard toll on everyone because onions are a staple of Indian food—the yum factor of many curries, vegetable dishes and meat delicacies. Of course, the poor have a harder time affording the higher prices, and it has made business more difficult for millions of street vendors, like Kumar, whose livelihood largely depends on the round bulbs they chop up and put into food sold on roadsides.
The steep climb in onion prices is largely being blamed on a particularly hot summer that led to a poor agricultural yield. A heavy monsoon also made it difficult for farmers in central and southern India to harvest their crops, and the rains have made transporting produce problematic. Rajinder Kumar Sharma, chairman of Azadpur Mandi in Delhi, Asia’s largest wholesale market for fruits and vegetables, offered an additional explanation. For past two years, he says, onion prices have actually been low compared with other crops, so farmers deliberately didn’t grow as many of the low-profit plants.
What has clearly exacerbated the price hike are traders hoarding onions to take advantage of the climbing costs. The spike is expected to ease over the next few months, when fresh stocks hit the market. In the meantime, to deal with the onion shortage, the Indian government has imposed a minimum export price of $650 per ton, but ruled out banning exports altogether. There has also been some talk of importing onions from countries such as China and Iran.
The latter would be a good idea, according to Ashok Gulati, the chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. He thinks chasing down hoarders—the government’s current policy—is inadequate and shortsighted. What’s really needed, he says, is some long-term planning, like building an efficient supply chain to move crops from farmers to organized retail groups and providing incentives to such groups to build good storage facilities, as well as creating a larger buffer stock of fresh vegetables to prevent market manipulation.
Many Indians are changing their eating habits in response to the price increases. “The situation is quite bad right now,” says Ravi Kumar, a chauffeur in Delhi, whose expenses have risen by 2,000 rupees (roughly $32) per month because of the cost of onions, along with the rising cost of other vegetables such as eggplant, cauliflowers and okra. “I am thinking it makes more sense to buy meat rather than vegetables,” he adds. “I’m serious. ”
Sanjay Malhotra, a restaurant manager in Delhi, says he has no choice but to shell out for 20 kilograms of onions every day. He says the blend of spicy Indian-Chinese food that his customers are accustomed to can’t be prepared without onions.
Onion powder, Gulati says, would have been a way to deal with the bland-food problem facing the nation. He notes, however, that India (unlike the Southeast Asian nations such as Thailand) doesn’t produce a lot of processed products and is mainly reliant on fresh agricultural produce.
Some people haven’t missed the opportunity to both protest and poke fun at the high onion prices. The Indian media reported of a tire salesman in Jamshedpur, in eastern India, who is offering 5 kilograms of onions free with the purchase of a truck tire and 1 kilogram with the purchase of two car radial tires. In Kolkata city, in eastern India, a sari store owner is reportedly giving away a kilogram of onions with a 500 rupees sari purchase.
Back in Kashmir, Kumar has started secretly adjusting his recipe for his street snacks to save cash. Instead of spending roughly a third of his meager daily earnings on more onions, he is swapping in some diced cucumbers. “So far,” he says, “The customers haven’t caught on.”
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