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Centre Starts Subsidised Sale of Tomatoes

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NEW DELHI, July 14: In a huge relief for consumers, the union government on Friday started selling tomatoes at ₹ 90 per kg in Delhi-NCR, Lucknow, Patna, and other chosen big cities across the country to combat its soaring prices.

Each person can buy only 2 kgs of tomato per head on subsidised rates. Freshly procured tomatoes arrived in the national capital overnight from mandis in key growing states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra.

The stocks of tomato will be distributed through retail outlets at “discounted prices” to the consumers in Delhi NCR region by Friday, this week, an official release had said on Wednesday. In Noida, tomatoes will be sold at the NCCF office at Rajnigandha Chowk and also through mobile vans in Greater Noida and other locations, officials said.

NCCF will start the sale in other cities such as Lucknow, Kanpur and Jaipur during the weekend, they added.

In Delhi, NCCF started the sale on Friday in all 11 districts through 20 mobile vans and five centres. About 17,000 kg of tomatoes will be sold in total on the first day, NCCF Chairman Vishal Singh said.

The Centre had on Wednesday directed its agricultural marketing agencies — National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) and National Cooperative Consumers’ Federation of India (NCCF) — to start immediate procurement of tomatoes in order to provide relief to consumers who were forced to buy it for as high as ₹ 150 to 160 per kg in the past month. It even went up to ₹ 224 per kg in several parts of the country, a massive increase from the usual ₹ 20-30 per kg rate.

NCCF Managing Director Anice Joseph Chandra has said, “We have fixed the price at ₹ 90 per kg, while the procurement rate is ₹ 120-130 per kg. The losses will be absorbed by the central government.

(Manas Dasgupta)