No Control on Prices

It is quite some time since the elections to the 15th Lok Sabha were over and the rewards to traders who made generous contributions to party election funds have been made equally generously by now. As such, people countenanced for some time the sharp rises in prices of commodities that are not seen after elections in the best of democracies, but are a normal feature of countries pretending to be democracies and countries where corruption is so rampant that they resemble banana republics quite closely. Here most people took this abnormal price rise as an inevitable adjunct of elections for the first couple of weeks. But even after the passage of months, prices continue to soar relentlessly without any semblance of control by the government. Potato prices have reached an all-time high of Rs 24 a kilo and other vegetables too have kept pace. The performance of the government on the price front can be summed up as a zero. Hence the only option left for the people is to go in for consumer resistance. Unless people bring in consumer resistance in a big way, they will never be able to control prices. The first target should be perishable goods and meat. People should cut their vegetable purchases to about half from the usual markets and then buy very small additional quantities from another market. People will have to go a little hungry for about a week. This is going to do a lot of good for everyone’s health, it is going to cut the usual sales of a market to about half, and vegetables are going to rot. We should do it for a week and watch prices fall. Our worst enemies will be those who do their shopping mostly with what they collect as bribes. But we have to enlist their help as well. THE SENTINEL