RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
As in China, people in India are being stretched by a surge in food prices. And in India what has stirred the greatest outrage is the price of onions. Onions are a pungent mainstay of Indian cooking, and over the past year they've gone up 40 percent. Analysts blame both crop failures and a food distribution system that allows middlemen to manipulate food prices.
NPR's Corey Flintoff reports from New Delhi.
COREY FLINTOFF: The narrow alleys of south Delhi's I.N.A. Market are lined with vegetable stalls, brimming with fresh produce of all kinds. One thing is in short supply though: onions.
Grocer R.L. Setty says an unusually wet summer made for a poor harvest in many areas.
Mr. R.L. SETTY (Grocer): Onion, this is at this time rain. It's no good quality.
FLINTOFF: He says he's hoping the price crunch will ease when the government starts bringing imported onions to Delhi next week.
Virender Khaneja, who sells spices at the Durga Masala Store, says it's not just onions - he's paying higher wholesale prices for all sorts of spices as well. He says middlemen - he calls them market mafia - are creating fake scarcities by holding back certain commodities until the prices rise.
Mr. VIRENDER KHANEJA (Durga Masala Store): Some market mafia are there. They keep five, six tons, 10 tons, on the side.
FLINTOFF: It's only after the price goes up, he says, that the middlemen send the produce to market.
Dr. Ripul Oberoi, shopping at the market with his wife, says the result is that prices seem to go higher every day.
Dr. RIPUL OBEROI: And for a consumer, for a middle-class person, or slightly below middle class, it's very difficult to have the daily routine items that everybody has to have to survive.
FLINTOFF: Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at Nehru University in Delhi, says the real pain is being felt by India's poor majority. For most middle-class people, food is a relatively small part of the budget.
Professor JAYATI GHOSH (Nehru University): But here, for about 60 percent of the population, if the price of food goes up by 10 percent, that means one less meal a day. It means children not getting milk. We're talking about very severe effects.
FLINTOFF: Ghosh blames the Indian government, which she says doesn't have an effective policy for managing food. She says the government needs to set up a system that can provide critical foods at reasonable prices that would dampen the effect of speculation in the marketplace.
Ms. GHOSH: I'm not going to do away with private, obviously not, and especially small traders are critical in the whole system. But you have to have a system that provides the essential food items, which is basic food grain, basic vegetables, edible oils, sugar.
FLINTOFF: Ghosh rejects the criticism that such a system would be a turn away from the free market ideas that India has embraced during its surging economic growth. She notes that the United States has similar programs, such as food stamps, designed to make food available to the lowest-income Americans.
Ms. GHOSH: You know, I think there are some things that are just too important to be left to the free market, and food is one of them, because food is essential. You have to feed your population. You can't say, well, too bad. If you don't have the money you can just starve to death. So food has to be managed.
FLINTOFF: India's government has taken short-term steps to manage the onion crisis, such as banning the export of Indian onions and importing onions from abroad.
The political leaders have every reason to be leery. Anger over high food prices, and especially onion prices, has contributed to election losses for India's ruling parties in the past, and many fear it could happen again.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, New Delhi.