A Case of Exploding Onions

THE WEEK travels to India’s largest onion market to find what makes it the most volatile vegetable.

- Niranjan Takle

The onion is a bulb bomb in India.

It is powerful enough even to shake governments. The Janata Party government at the Centre in 1979 and the BJP government in Delhi in the 90s are still considered victims of onion heat.

In 2013, yet again, we saw onions exploding. Prices skyrocketed to record levels, prompting Twitter jokes such as onion rings giving diamond rings a run for their money.

Jokes apart, a bunch of thieves actually attempted to hijack a truck with 40 tonnes of onion on the Jaipur-Delhi highway. A daily-deal company’s website crashed after it announced to sell onions at ₹9 a kilo to the first 3,000 customers. And onion had become the most googled word in India in mid-September.

A few missing pieces of chopped onion in an omelette nearly got a wayside eatery owner in Uttar Pradesh bumped off! A trigger-happy customer was reportedly enraged as the shopkeeper argued that onion was too precious these days. Fortunately, the shopkeeper ducked in time, and the gunshot missed him by a whisker.

Far away from such onion tales, Bhaskar Nyaharkar sat rueing his plight. The onion farmer in Maharashtra’s Nashik districts home to about 70 per cent of India’s onion trade is in the middle of a muddle, clueless about meeting his family’s needs.

Not faraway, Omprakash Raka basked in glory. The onion trader was in the middle of overflowing sweetened milk and mithai. He had made a huge profit, and was celebrating his election as chairman of Lasalgaon Merchants’ Cooperative Bank. The Lasalgaon market is India’s largest onion market.