In the shadow of the regional agricultural market headquarters, aggressive middlemen are routinely skimming weights and rigging prices on tribal forest produce.
Kanker, May 17 — Middlemen in our weekly haat bazaars aren’t just trading goods; they’re pulling off one of the most unequal transactions in the modern agricultural economy by handing over five rupees worth of common salt and walking away with a thousand rupees of premium chironji seed.
This isn’t a historical anecdote from a forgotten colonial archive. It’s happening right now across Bastar, where an entrenched network of aggressive traders continues to strip immense wealth from the local rural economy, exploiting the very people who do the hardest physical labour.
And the state institutions that exist to protect us are watching it happen from their own backyards.
I didn’t visit the local market this week looking for a story. I went to sell my own family’s harvest. My mother had spent hours manually preparing the tamarind from the trees in our yard, cracking the brittle shells, removing the heavy seeds, and carefully separating the valuable sticky pulp. We kept a small portion for our own kitchen, and I bagged up the rest for the market.
I packed the processed tamarind pulp and the extracted seeds into separate loads and drove to the Bastar market square. Local contacts told me to find a specific cluster of shops operating near a large banyan tree, noting these buyers offered fairer rates and wouldn’t cheat as badly.
But simply reaching a shopfront in these haats requires running a physical gauntlet. The traders, whom we call kochiyas, don’t wait patiently for sellers to approach their stalls. They aggressively intercept villagers the moment we step off our vehicles. They’ll physically grab heavy sacks directly out of our hands, pulling the goods toward their storefronts to force a transaction through sheer intimidation.
I pushed through the chaos, reached a shop opposite a local hotel, and asked the shopkeeper for today’s rate. We agreed on a price, and I placed my heavy plastic sack of tamarind directly onto his electronic scale, assuming I’d get a fair reading.
The digital readout displayed exactly 35.6 kilograms.
The shopkeeper didn’t care. He casually declared he’d pay for exactly 35 kilograms flat, fully intending to wipe 600 grams of valuable produce off the ledger entirely. I wasn’t having it. I immediately challenged the math and pointed directly at the machine’s bright display.
He didn’t flinch. He claimed he had to deduct the 600 grams to account for the weight of the sack itself, insisting it wasn’t his fault.
I couldn’t believe the ridiculous defence. I quickly pointed out that I’d packed my tamarind in a standard, thin plastic woven sack that doesn’t weigh anywhere near 600 grams. Realising I’d caught him in an obvious lie, the thin shopkeeper rapidly shifted his defence from basic physics to bureaucratic authority. He told me the local “mandi wallas”—the official agricultural market regulators—had explicitly mandated this exact weight deduction, and he couldn’t break their rules.
I refused to back down. I argued fiercely with the buyer until I won the dispute, eventually forcing the trader to hand over the missing cash.
How many exhausted gatherers, lacking the energy or confidence to fight a shouting match over a rigged scale, simply surrender their margins to these men every single week?
The theft doesn’t stop at the scales.
Later that same afternoon, I witnessed the second phase of the market’s exploitation. I sat down in a chair near the edge of another shop, casually reading a newspaper. Since nobody in the immediate area recognised me, the traders didn’t hold back. Soon, a group of young kochiyas gathered nearby and began bragging about how easily they’d manipulated their indigenous suppliers.
One young middleman proudly explained his specific technique for buying amchoor, or dried mango powder, ensuring he doesn’t pay full price. When a seller presents a fresh batch, the trader immediately attacks its visual quality. He points to slight variations in the colour of the powder, arguing it isn’t pure. He uses this perceived imperfection to ruthlessly drive down the buying price, convincing the seller their product is deeply inferior and won’t sell for the standard rate.
Once the gatherer accepts the lowball offer and walks away, the deception is complete. The trader simply dumps the “inferior” dark amchoor into a massive pile alongside the lighter, premium powder. He mixes it all together thoroughly so you can’t tell the difference. When he packs up and sells the bulk product to urban wholesale markets, it all moves at the exact same high premium rate.
This deeply unequal exchange system operates in plain sight.
It thrives in the exact locations where state officials should ensure it doesn’t happen. Bastar serves as a major hub for the region’s Agricultural Produce Market Committee. The Mandi Board operates right here, yet they’re nowhere to be seen on the market floor.
Taxpayers fund these regular government salaries, but the state officials drawing them aren’t doing their jobs. Their explicit, legal mandate is to protect the interests of farmers and manual labourers from this exact kind of market exploitation. Yet, just steps away from their offices, traders openly lie about mandi regulations to steal tamarind, rig amchoor prices, and sustain a brutal barter system that trades a thousand rupees of chironji nuts for five rupees of cheap salt.
So I have a fundamental question for the politicians and policymakers dictating this region’s future. You cannot have a genuine conversation about the Bastar development model while this exploitative system remains intact. The regional economy won’t ever grow as long as these traders actively strip hardworking people of the true value of their labour.
The regulators collect their paycheques, but they won’t stop the open looting.
