Shillong, June 6: The COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone’s life difficult cutting across all sections of society and age groups. It’s been over a year and the fight against the novel corona virus has only intensified instead of dwindling. There were hopes that the country would be able to return to normalcy in few months once the vaccine was announced at the beginning at the year, but so far, of its population of an estimated 1.39 billion, India has managed to fully vaccinate only a little over 44.5 million people till date while a little over 183.5 million have received the first dose of the vaccine. This is quite a slow pace of inoculation and shortage of vaccines has been a major factor for this.
Nonetheless, people’s lives have to move on irrespective of the vaccination whereby pulses, cereals, and fresh vegetables are an essential part of a healthy diet. The problem here is that people selling fresh veggies are also affected by the lockdowns and movement restrictions brought on by the corona pandemic. While pulses and cereals have a longer shelf life, fresh vegetables don’t. This means the vegetable vendors need to keep replenishing their stock with new ones in 2-3 days otherwise the old stock starts to go bad.
This also puts an additional burden on farmers and transport vehicles and wholesalers to ensure that the supply of fresh veggies to the market is on time and stable. But, what happens when there are so many shops selling vegetables?
This is the case currently in Shillong city where very few vegetable shops are allowed to open in the localities and the wholesale market – Iewduh is closed. Here, not only are the consumers stressed, but the farmers are also at a loss on ways to sell their veggies.
One M.D. Wajid, a vegetable wholesale vendor, said he’s been having a very difficult time in selling the vegetables as Meghalaya has allowed their trucks to enter the state but there are no shops and local vendors to buy their stock. They have resorted to parking their trucks along the road and hope that they find few customers but the police keeps chasing them away. Due to the low shelf life of vegetables, if they are unable to sell much, they need to throw away whatever is left. Thus, their loss is enormous.
Another vendor said he’s been selling vegetables by moving around in his vehicle at throwaway prices as he doesn’t want to carry them back, at the same time he’s on the lookout for police officials lest they compound him.
A female vegetable vendor said this is her first time in Shillong. She has booked her vehicle all the way from Garchuk in Assam in hopes of selling her vegetables here which she also bought from farmers, but she along with other vendors hasn’t been allowed by the police officials to sell their stock. “Where do I take this back now… with the situation like this here, how do we survive…,” she asks adding that she will take whatever little money she can get from the sale of her veggies because she needs to feed her kids, finance their education and run the house.
