Maybe India's poor should just stop eating. That would be the best solution given the price of onions which, at 100 rupees ($1.60) a kilo, are unaffordable. In the past year, the price of onions has risen by 150 per cent.
When I used to walk past a construction site near my home where labourers were having their lunch, I would see them eating 'chapatis' (flat bread) and raw onions. Never any vegetables or lentils: these are out of their reach. The chapati is the cheapest thing they can get and the onion helped give a bit of 'flavour' to it, along, perhaps, with a fresh green chilli.
Now, when I pass them, I see only the chapatis. Of course I know why it's disappeared but I asked them anyway. "I can't afford to buy onions. It's the first time in my life that I haven't been able to buy something so basic," one of them told me.
Onions are an essential ingredient of Indian food. They provide the foundation for thousands of curries and other dishes. Cooking Indian food without onions is a non-starter. But in recent weeks, even middle class Indians have been shocked to find this ordinary item so expensive. These days, they are not talking about corruption or the verdicts given to the men who gang raped a young medical student. They are grumbling about onion prices.
India is the largest onion producer in the world, after China. Indians get through 15 million tonnes of onions every year. The price of onions is so ludicrously high that it is becoming a political issue. In the past, high onion prices have brought down governments: the Delhi and Rajasthan governments in 1998.
It's making the current government very unpopular too but oddly enough, the government is letting onions become a Rolex for the poor without intervening.
Seasonal fluctuations in supply may be partly responsible. The unrelenting monsoon rains this year have also caused some damage to the onion crop. But nothing explains the astronomical price. And the Indian farmer certainly isn't enjoying a windfall.
Everyone knows that middlemen are hoarding onions. Even when the produce is plentiful, traders and middlemen hold back stocks to keep prices artificially high. India's Competition Commission is looking into allegations that cartels and hoarding are pushing up the price but the investigation is taking months to complete.
Meanwhile, no minister has expressed dismay that the poor are suffering. No onions? Let them eat éclairs. In fact, food inflation has been a feature of the Congress-led government for several years. Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi likes to pose as someone whose heart bleeds for India's poor. She forgets, conveniently, that the party has ruled the country for some 54 of the 67 years since Independence and has spectacularly failed to remove poverty.
But she appears to be unaware that rising food prices always hit the poor the hardest because the bulk of their income goes on food. In July, vegetable prices had risen by 46 per cent over the previous year.
As it is, ordinary Indians survive on a pathetic diet. If onions are Rolexes, meat, fish, and fruit are, well, Gulfstream jets. Tomatoes are also going the way of onions. To make a curry with some gravy, you need at least four or five tomatoes. Poor Indians are using only one or two these days because tomato prices have also gone through the roof. So their food is even more tasteless than before.
Food vendors and fruit juice sellers have found that all their ingredients have become more expensive but they can only increase their prices so much, without losing their customers who are poor workers. This is where the urban poor suffer from having no backup. At least in the villages, they can grow something. In the slums where the urban poor live, they have to buy every single item.
The members of the government seem oblivious to the rage coursing through Indian society, some of it expressed in funny and bloody ways.
Car showrooms are offering a bag of onions as a gift to entice buyers. An enraged customer shot a roadside food stall owner in the head after being served an omelette with only a smidgen of onion. Last month, a group of armed men ambushed a truck on the Delhi-Jaipur highway carrying onions to the market and made off with 40 tonnes.
Notwithstanding the bursts of humour, come the 2014 general election when voters will be able to vent their fury, the government could end up crying.