Nearly two weeks after demonetisation, the business community at eastern India’s largest wholesale market in Kolkata’s Burra Bazar is furious. The community, which has remained loyal to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the years, has suffered close to “100 per cent” fall in business. The office-bearers of at least three merchant associations in and around Burra Bazar said the BJP will “pay dearly” for demonetisation.
“There was hardly any customer in the first week. Business dropped by 100 per cent,” said general secretary of the Posta Bazar Merchants Association, Biswanath Agarwal.
The Posta Bazaar takes up the largest space in Burra Bazar — spread over almost two square kilometres — and hosts traders in pulses, sugar, oil, flour and lime. Mr. Agarwal said semi-wholesalers and retailers have started coming returning but the “rise is only by about 20 per cent” in the last two days.
“But Burra Bazar’s total turnover is much above 100 crore daily. The majority of the transaction is not in black but in cash. Thousands of crores has been lost in the last few days,” said Mr. Agarwal.
Not so hot potatoesThe president of the Posta Bazar Potato Merchants’ Association, Gurupada Sinha, who controls a substantial part of the business, said he would not be surprised if farmers “commit suicide” at the time of payment.
Mr. Sinha, whose family has been in the trade for four generations, said the potato sowing season has started only about two weeks ago in Bengal.
“The seed and the raw material for cultivation arrive from Punjab and are sold in cash. But the farmer has no new cash and thus he would borrow from lenders and fail to repay it,” he pointed out. “The biggest panic is if the entire old currency, which is not necessarily black, will be rejected now as the exchange amount is getting reduced.”
I-T raids irk communityThe pulses market is perhaps the biggest as it supplies to nearly a dozen States. The general secretary of the Shree Vishnu Dal Mills Association, Satyanarayan Gupta said the market is depressed by “about 90 percent.”
“The Daspara pulses market [north-central Kolkata] has a daily turnover of 15 crore. This has come down to one crore. We pay in cash to workers daily and the cash is not there,” said Mr. Gupta. Additionally, successive Income-Tax raids over the last week in Burra Bazar have also irked the community.
“Targeting traders for a few lakhs of stock or cash is an attack on the Baniyas [merchant community] to choke small business for the benefit of the multinationals,” Mr. Gupta charged.
