With resumption of bus and train services, merchants from other districts and from nearby States visited the E.K.M. Abdul Gani Textile Market (Gani market) here on Tuesday.
There are 370 permanent shops on the premises that function every day while 730 shops function from Monday night to Tuesday night. Following the COVID-19 second wave, all the shops were closed from May 6 and were reopened on July 5. However, shops were allowed to function only till 9 p.m. and the weekly market was not allowed to function throughout the night.
Merchants from Andhra Pradesh and Kerala visited the weekly shops on Tuesday and placed orders while traders from across the district and from other districts also visited the market. Though expected sales did not happen, traders said the volume of sale had picked up when compared to last week.
S. Sakthivel, secretary, Erode Gani Market Weekly Textile Traders’ Association, said since bus services resumed and most of the trains were operated, merchants arrived at the market without trouble. “We expect sales to improve in the coming weeks,” he said and added that Aadi sales had picked up in the market. Since lockdown norms were relaxed and business returned to normalcy in other States, sale of textiles to Maharashtra, Gujarat and West Bengal had also improved in the past two weeks.
