Delhi onions go on sale at ₹35 a kilo as Kanda Express unloads Nashik stock
Retail prices in the capital had reached ₹55–60. Nafed, NCCF and Kendriya Bhandar will sell from a 1.21-lakh-tonne national buffer. All-India retail onion is up 56% from a year ago.
New Delhi2 min read
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The Union government began selling onions at ₹35 a kilogramme in Delhi on Thursday. Union Food Minister Pralhad Joshi inaugurated the counter. Open-market retail in the capital had been running at ₹55 to ₹60. The discount is about 36% from that range.
The bulbs come from a 1.21-lakh-tonne buffer held in producing states for 2026. Three agencies will retail them: Nafed, the National Cooperative Consumers' Federation, and Kendriya Bhandar. NCCF managing director Anice Joseph Chandra said sales start in Delhi on Thursday and move into the wider National Capital Region by the weekend. NCCF holds 62,000 tonnes. Nafed holds just under 55,000.
Railways did the haulage. Dedicated rakes branded Kanda Express left Nashik, the main Maharashtra producing belt. One rake carried 800 tonnes toward Delhi. NCCF separately moved 400 tonnes on the same corridor. Consumer Affairs Secretary Nidhi Khare said further rakes are planned for Chennai, Ernakulam, Madurai and Guwahati. Nafed will also sell in Kochi and Guwahati. NCCF is talking to Mother Dairy about using some of its 300 Delhi outlets and will put 15 mobile vans on the road at first, then 40.
The price spike is national. Ministry figures put the all-India average retail price at ₹44.72 a kilo on 25 August, up 28% from ₹34.80 a month earlier and 56% from ₹28.67 a year earlier. Another ministry series showed ₹43.53 retail on 24 August against ₹27.37 a year before, with wholesale at ₹35.58 against ₹21.23. Chennai was at ₹60, Delhi at ₹55 and Kolkata at ₹53 on the 24 August snapshot.
Onions are a political vegetable in India because households buy them often and because Maharashtra's harvest calendar can miss the festival demand window. Buffer releases are the standard answer. They work when the stock is close to the city and the retail network is already in place. Kendriya Bhandar's 100 Delhi stores meet that test. Mother Dairy's booths would widen it. Mobile vans are the government's way of reaching neighbourhoods that do not walk to a Bhandar counter.
The risk is leakage. Subsidised onions at ₹35 next to a ₹55 market create an arbitrage. Traders can buy the cheap stock and sell it back into the open market if the agencies do not cap quantities per person and if they do not police the vans. The ministry has not published a household limit in the Thursday notices. It has published a list of cities and a timetable.
Delhi's own government said it would buy onions and sugar from Nafed if prices keep rising, and that it would check sugar godowns for stocks held above the permitted limit. Sugar was at ₹64 a kilo in the capital on 25 August. The two commodities travel together in the political argument even when their supply chains do not.
Thursday's ₹35 is a ceiling the Centre is willing to defend in one city with one buffer. If Chennai, Guwahati and Madurai get the same price once the later rakes arrive, the intervention becomes a national floor. If those cities stay at ₹53 to ₹60, Delhi's cheap onion is a capital privilege funded by Maharashtra's stored crop.
