31 December,2010 06:37 AM IST | | Natasha Gupta
While city cries for onions, government takes more than a week to clear consignment
While the city is starving for want of onions, tonnes have been rotting away at JNPT awaiting governmental clearance.
MiD DAY found that the usual two to three days required for agricultural goods clearance at the port is taking close to seven or eight days now for reasons unknown.
The consignment that has been received by the traders at the APMC market is rotten and green shoots are sprouting out of the onions as they were stored in the containers for too long
Pradeep Vaswani, an importer/exporter, said, "My consignment from Karachi reached JNPT on December 22 but I got the clearance on December 29, that is after seven days."
Laxman Pingale, the APMC trader who handled Vaswani's stock, said that the consignment that has been received is rotten and green shoots are sprouting out of the onions as they were stored in the containers for too long. "The government took too long in clearing the stock.
If they had cleared it earlier, the stock would not have gone bad and we could have earned more money," said Pingale.
Vaswani informed that the Ministry of Agriculture first takes samples of onions in the containers, gets them tested and depending upon the report, the containers are cleared.
"While all this usually takes about two days, in our case it took seven days. People need it the most now and we cannot give it to them as it is very difficult getting the goods to the market," he said.
Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Director Ashok Walunj confirmed that on an average agricultural goods are cleared within two or three days.
However, he denied that traders are being made to wait for several days to get clearance from the Ministry.
"Initially, we had to struggle to get duty-free imports even after the government had declared onion imports duty-free on December 23. After we got that, our stock was in dock over the weekend.
We again had to struggle to get clearance from the Public Health Office," said Sunil Karara, another importer/exporter of onions.
"The officials have not been very co-operative. We've spent Rs 20,000 per day and more than a lakh rupees in port charges (for onion container storage at the port) while we await clearance."
Karara's Global India Company had ordered 55 tonnes of onions, which took eight days for clearance.
He said, "The eight-tonne stock that came in on Tuesday came from Wagah Border where it was cleared in 30 minutes and here our stock rots away for days as we await clearance.
My stock had reached Mumbai shores by December 22 and was cleared by customs yesterday."
Both Vaswani and Karar have suffered financial losses. "It took me a week to get clearance for my first consignment which was of 25 ton," said Vaswani.
"Another six containers with 12 tonnes each arrived yesterday from Karachi to JNPT. They will start the same procedure again today and again they will take so long."
As the wait for the imported onions continued at APMC, Nitin Parakh, a trader, said, "Even though the quality of the onions that are coming in is not good, the market is so bleak that people are ready to accept whatever is available."
The Other Side
Minister of State for Agriculture (Union of India) K V Thomas, on being asked about the extended time period for which onion imports were being held up, said, "I'm not aware that consignments are being held for so long at the JNPT. Nobody has told me about this, but I will find out."
