Hilsa selling at Rs 1,200-1,600/kg in Kolkata

KOLKATA: It inspires poetry, rapture and euphoria in equal measure. For once though, the hilsa is also evoking curses. Bengal’s favourite fish
has raced up the price charts this monsoon and reached those rarefied levels where only a select few can buy it. Currently, the best of the lot — weighing 2 kg or more — is selling at Rs 1,200-1,600 a kg in Kolkata’s markets.

Asim Pramanik, a fish-seller at Gariahat market, sold two fishes worth Rs 1,200 per kg on Wednesday. ‘‘Each weighed a little over 2 kg,’’ he said.

Pramanik learnt the ropes of the fish trade from his father, who also had a stall at the same market. He can’t remember a single year when the price of hilsa touched such stratospheric levels. Neither can Arup Saha, a fish vendor at Manicktala market in north Kolkata. Till a couple of days back, he had sold the fish at Rs 1,600 a kg. ‘‘There are very few takers for such expensive fish but we can’t do a thing about it,’’ Saha said.

Things have come to such a pass that a jewellery shop is offering discounts on products if the fish is bought from select stores. So where has all the fish gone? At one level, it is a supply chain management crisis. The inflow from Bangladesh has come down to a trickle, sending shivers down Kolkata’s markets.

For the past few monsoons, the stocks coming in from the neighbouring country had stood at a steady 2,000 tonnes a day. But the supply was badly hit after the Bangladesh government decided to ban the fishing of hilsas weighing less than 600 gm, popularly known as ‘khoka ilish’.

For fishermen on the Hooghly and Rupnarayan, an unkind monsoon has come as the biggest blow.