Horticorp vendors in dire straits

Plastic trays, some filled with fresh vegetables and others filled with the not-so-fresh, are lined up in front of Babu’s small bunk shop, painted in the trademark green colours of Horticorp, near Nathencode junction.

“All the fresh ones, I bought from outside. I open this shop at 6 a.m., but the Horticorp’s supply vehicle comes here only around noon. Even the vegetables that they supply are of low quality, for which there are no takers,” says Babu.

Less than a km away, the situation is similar at Suma Sumesh’s Horticorp bunk shop.

“The fresh vegetables that you see here, I bought on credit from the Chala market. We have been complaining about the low quality of supplies from Horticorp for a long time, but to no avail,” she says.

On Wednesday, The Hindu talked to half-a-dozen of these Horticorp vendors, who all had similar complaints about the quality of supplies. All of them talked about the diminishing returns from these shops.

“This shop was started by my mother more than 16 years back. Since then, we have been getting a commission of just 12 percent on purchases from Horticorp. On an average, we buy vegetables for Rs.1,500 and so we get just Rs.180 per day.

“Accounting for the rotten and damaged stock on some days, our earnings are even less than that. How are we supposed to survive on that?” asks Suma.

In Babu’s case, he had been running a vegetable shop successfully for more than two decades. He was forced to close it down three years back as the owner asked him to vacate. He became a franchisee of Horticorp after this.

“I used to have sales of around Rs. 6,000 daily in my old shop. Here, in the initial days I used to get close to Rs. 3,000 in the initial days, but it has dwindled to just about Rs.1,000 daily. As the commission amount is too low, I am mired in debts,” he says.

Two years back, these bunk owners got together to form an association for effective bargaining with the authorities.

“The numbers of Horticorp bunks that have closed down in recent years tell a story. There were between 100 and 200 such shops in the city at a time. Now, there are just 54 such shops. Many of them are on the verge of closing down,” says Shaji, president of the Bunk owners’ Association, who runs a shop near Chalakkuzhy Road.