Salt prices soar in telangana
The Telangana police is probing the racket behind spreading the rumour about non-availability of salt, which has seen its price escalating to Rs 300 per kg from Rs 25-Rs 30 per kg only two days ago. It is believed that the rumour originated from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. On Saturday, people at several towns in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh rushed to grocery and general stores since morning and started buying salt in bulk, believing the rumour that there has been a severe scarcity of salt in the country. The officials in the Telangana civil supplies department told this newspaper that “these rumours were spread by some vested interests to make money in the wake of the prevailing crisis like situation after the scrapping of big notes”. “We have asked the police to book cases against those who are spreading these rumours,” said an official with the department. Since last night some people have spread the news that the country was going to face a salt shortage. This, coupled with the non-availability of smaller notes and abolition of big notes, has pushed the prices high. In Guntur district the officials have found that the shop owners have taken advantage of the panic among people and demanded higher prices and accepted notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000. Real estate crashed by 70%, new big budget film releases got halted and gold sold at Rs 51,000 per tola (10 grams). This is the immediate impact of the cancellation of big denomination currency notes— Rs 500 and Rs 1,000—by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the night of 8 November. Even on the second day after they opened, banks and ATMs failed to meet the public demand.
The travails of the ordinary people, who wanted to convert their old notes or get at least some cash, do not seem to end due to woefully inadequate capability and response of the banking system in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The first casualty of the abolition of the big notes is the real estate sector, whose sales and purchases are mostly done in black, hard cash. Even the big real estate companies that claim to have been carrying out their operations in white, through cheques and demand drafts, are hit by the PM’s war against black money. Hyderabad and Bangalore are the two southern metros most affected by the move.
Interestingly, Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) took the lead in representing the grievances of the real estate sector to Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan on Thursday night. KCR pointed out that the sector’s revenues plum-