NASHIK: Almost every Indian meal requires an onion – one of the cooking essentials along with sugar and lentils that sweet-talking politicians use to curry favour with their voters by lowering costs.
But their policies to cut prices by slapping export bans on some goods including on onions and sugar, or by allowing duty-free imports of lentils, has made the key voting demographic of farmers furious.
They say the politicians’ decisions flood the markets, and that the savings shoppers make are at their expense.
“The governments talk a lot about us,” said onion farmer Kanha Vishnu Gulave. “But their actions only hurt us – to keep the easily agitated city people happy by keeping our produce cheap.”
Gulave, 28, comes from India’s onion-producing heartland of Nashik district in Maharashtra state, which produces some 40 percent of onions nationwide.
He felt cheated when prices crashed after a sudden export ban in December.
“We dread elections,” said Bharat Dighole, onion producers’ association president for Maharashtra. “The most unwise interventions come around polls.”
After the ban, prices dropped to sometimes less than a third, Dighole said.
That sparked dozens of small-scale protests in Maharashtra.
Onion barometer
At the same time, production expenses have more than doubled since 2017, Dighole added.
But the slump in wholesale prices meant that was not passed on to the consumer – or voter, from the politicians’ viewpoint.
They paid the same for their onions as they had done for years.
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