BENGALURU: You may have gone without your onion dosa, pakoda salad and raitha, and the biryani may have seemed bland, but onion merchants have laughed all the way to the bank, pockets bulging with good fortune. The proof is in the bank books: the APMC market in Yeshwantpura made a whopping transaction of Rs 1,023 crore in the past eight months. “We made higher transactions than the past three years, though the inflow of produce has been quite low this year,” said Ramesh V, joint director, Yeshwantpura APMC Yard.
Inflow of onions into the APMC market, compared to previous years, touched almost half the regular quantity -- from around 50,000 to 1 lakh quintals per day earlier, this year, it dropped to around 25,000 quintals per day.“The recent floods in neighbouring states, from where onions would come in, reduced drastically the inflow this time. However, because of their pricing, APMC made good transactions and we were able to make good profits,” the official said.
In all, 58 lakh quintals of onions reached the market in the past eight months. Onions were procured from Egypt and Turkey too. “We still have time till March-end for onions to come into the market. The price, which touched almost 150 per kg, creating history in our market, has come down to Rs 65 per kg now. But this is still high as the price slips to around Rs 30 around this time,” said an onion trader.
Meanwhile, retailers also seem to have made good money this year. A trader said, “If the minimum price of onions was around Rs 120 per kg, it was often sold for Rs 200 per kg. Even small onions, which were priced at Rs 40 per kg, were sold at Rs 80 per kg. They made good money,” he said. However, the ones who missed the jackpot were mostly those farmers who had harvested their crop a bit early, and the onion had gone bad, leaving them at the losing end.
Meanwhile, the APMC also made a killing, collecting Rs 10.23 crore in user fee in just eight months. “We collect 1 per cent of the transaction done from the traders, as we provide infrastructure. So we made Rs 10.24 crore, and expect a little more in the next five to six months,” Ramesh said.