Price hype in the port city

The two largest hoarding markets of the country, Khatunganj and Korbaniganj, are actually two contiguous streets lined on both sides with trading shops, wholesalers and retailers, banks, financing houses in older buildings, and godowns crammed with legally and illegally imported goods.

The business community, here, consists of old-timer Hindu merchants (only a few families now operating), and by the Muslim emerging merchant class, many of whom are embarrassingly illiterate but are all Hajis to a man.

In very few places of the country is this comfortable cohabitation of divinity and fiscality can be noticed. And, in very few places again, such combination of illiteracy and big money seems to have become a permanent feature.

In Chittagong, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to become a rich person. And, it is often understood that religion has a greater appeal to people with less knowledge but more money, and such is the situation that the holy month of Ramadan does arrive in the port city with as much relief for the merchant community as with hiccups for the general members of the society. Ramadan is a real swell time for the oil-skinned merchants of the port city.

It's believed that merchants in the two areas control, regulate, monitor and fix the prices of essentials on the basis of what goods they have in stock. Stock means pure and simple hoarding for a price hype at the great discomfort of the teeming population of the port city.

The headline of a local daily raged on October 24 that prices of commodities in the city were rising freestyle, in spite of the repeated warnings from Commerce Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury, who is very much a son of the soil. The daily had an accompanying picture in which spices of all kinds, onions, and vegetable oils were printed as the commodities grilled by the price hike.

And, the dear sweet wife of the writer of this column was exasperated after her latest visit to the nearby vegetable market as the vendors asked an exorbitant price for every thing she bought or wanted to buy. She is actually the indirect victim, and the direct victim is your moneybag, mind you.

Sometimes, we foolishly think that religion must have a sobering effect on the pecuniary tendencies. Wrong. The profit-motive doesn't desert us even during a holy month, and business is transacted in a manner from which nothing can be further than the word 'sacrifice'.

The famous demand-supply curve is an acknowledged formula to justify the doings of the businessmen. At the onset of the Ramadan, demands shoot up; supplies stagnate, so prices increase. This explanation is lame, as it has no room for hoarding.

But hoarding is at the bottom of the conspiratorial role of the market. It is said repeatedly in the Holy Quran that God has earmarked the most abysmal corner in hell for the hoarders. But, as Francis Bacon has said in one of his essays, that the corrupt businessmen do not fear God, though they fear the policemen.

What are the state discipliners, the police included, doing about the price hike?