The apple season has started in Himachal Pradesh. This year is especially significant as a new practice has come into force: the State’s key horticulture crop is being sold by weight instead of the established practice of being sold per box. While this decision has been widely hailed by apple growers, it has been reluctantly accepted by commission agents and middlemen.
For a long time, the apple growers of Himachal Pradesh had been demanding that apples be procured in markets (mandis) on the basis of weight (in kilogrammes) and not by box. This is because they would invariably sell their produce according to the weight of the box and not the real weight of the produce, which was usually higher than the weight of the box. This resulted in losses for apple growers. The key problem was that there were no standard cartons in which the apples were packed.
The woes of apple growers began when wooden apple boxes were replaced in the late 1990s with cardboard-based telescopic boxes. The wooden boxes were not flexible, which meant that the quantity of apples in every box would remain the same (around 20 kg). However, with the advent of flexible telescopic cartons, boxes with a capacity of 20-24 kg each would end up in mandis with the produce weighing 30-35 kg at times. The apple growers complained that commission agents would arm-twist them into weighing the box. The commission agents, they said, would threaten not to buy the produce saying the apples were “loose or low grade” (small/poor quality) unless the grower compensated them by stuffing the box with extra apples. This would help the agents get more produce and make an additional profit after selling it to traders. The growers were left with no choice given the perishable nature of apples and the absence of an adequate number of controlled atmosphere chambers to store apples.
