Chinese produce at juicy prices

Relatively cheap Chinese fruits and vegetables are now giving rural India something to cheer about in this age of inflation. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 14, 2007, 04:01:34 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, Ballia/New Delhi

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The Chinese goods market in India is no longer limited to electronics and clothes. Cheap Chinese fruits and vegetables are now giving rural India something to cheer about in this age of inflation.

Priced a good 15-20 per cent less than Indian produce, Chinese apples, grapes, kiwi, capsicum, garlic and cauliflower are an instant hit.

“They are in huge demand. I think the reason is that they are juicier and priced less than most Indian fruits and vegetables,” says Ramik Ram Yadav, a fruit vendor in the Bariyya area of Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh. He claims to sell about a tonne of Chinese products every day in this backward region.

In Asia’s biggest fruit market in Azadpur, New Delhi, fruit and vegetable merchants claim that the demand for Chinese fruits has increased by 30-40 per cent and for vegetables by about 10 per cent in the last one year. “As most of these products land in the Indian market during the off season, demand is rising,” says Balkrishan Jaggi of the Apple Merchant Association in New Delhi.

Chinese apples land in India in January, the off-season for the domestic apple market. “They (Chinese) have built huge infrastructure of cold stores in China where apples are stored directly from the farms. When there is a short supply in the Indian market, the produce is released from the cold stores into India,” he explains. The same goes for grapes and kiwi.

Chinese agents in India market the produce well. The fruits land in various ports in India, from where they are transported directly to the domestic market. The better quality produce goes to the cities while the remaining is sent to India’s rural belt.

Prices are competitive for the Indian domestic market.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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