Tomatoes are costing Rs 100 per Kg

Tomatoes the main vegetable in daily use has become very costly.While most of the vegetables have become dearer to some extent, Tomatoes have reach very high. The reasons for the demand and rise in price are not known.  Powering the surge in prices of daily food items across the country is the humble tomato whose price has shot up by as much as five times in the past few weeks.

In Hyderabad, the vegetable, a staple in most Indian diets, even hit record prices of Rs. 80 to  100 a kg. Many poor people use tomato and onion curry as they are cheap and the curry can be prepared in no time. But now even rich are getting a pinch of the Tomatoes in the market.There is still no clear explanation for why prices have gone up; the common reasoning is that  un-seasonal rains have damaged crops and reduced supply, leading prices to skyrocket. Some people who are ignorant of he reasons including the sellers blamed it on GST. GST has in fact got nothing to do with the vegetables.

The  tomato production, it was found that supply had actually gone up compared to last year. But the demand is also very high it is reported.

We looked at the quantity of vegetables arriving at mandis in India’s biggest tomato-producing states through the month of May when prices began to surge, and found an increase of almost two to four times compared to last year.

Mandis in Telangana  – saw arrivals in tonnes  in May this year, up from  last year for the same month. Similarly, tomato arrivals in Telangana’s agricultural markets rose this year.Maharashtra saw a dramatic rise from 34,000 tonnes of tomatoes in May  to 1.26 lakh tonnes in the same month this year.

The only major tomato-producing state where production has dropped is Karnataka – from 22,500 tonnes  to 15,600 tonnes for the same month this year.But the drop is not dramatic enough to explain soaring prices in key cities connected to these tomato-producing states.

According to data from the Consumer Affairs Ministry, tomato prices in Hyderabad rose from Rs. 28 per kg in June  to Rs. 56 per kg in June 2016 to Rs 80 per Kg in 2017.

For the same months, in Mumbai, the prices increased from Rs. 22 per kg last year to Rs. 60 per kg this year.

In Chennai, prices went up from Rs. 25 per kg last year to Rs. 62 per kg this year for the same time period and in Bengaluru, rates went up from Rs. 22 per kg to Rs. 57 per kg for the month of June ..

What is even more baffling is that the government has projected an annual increase in tomato production from 16 million tonnes last year to over 18 million tonnes this year, suggesting that farmers, despite bad weather, have managed to ramp up capacity.