Vegetable prices in Puducherry today, and where the numbers came from

How these prices are collected — the whole method

Two pages currently rank for this query in Puducherry. One carries 36 vegetables in a bare table with a disclaimer that accuracy is not guaranteed. The other carries around 60 but shows contradictory dates in the header and the footnote and has a broken FAQ entry asking which mandi has the cheapest is_active. Neither says where a single number came from. So here is ours, in full.

Who collects it. One person — our buyer — on the same round every morning, six days a week. Not a scraper, not an aggregator feed, not a state mandi bulletin.

Where, and when. Between 5 and 6 am he is at farm gates in the Bahour and Villianur communes, buying against that day's orders. Between 6 and 6.30 am he walks Grand Bazaar — Goubert Market — and notes what three or four vendors are asking for the same lines. On Mondays and Thursdays the round includes Thengaithittu harbour for the fish list.

What our column means. The delivered retail price for that item today: what we paid at the gate, plus grading, weighing, packing and the van. It is the price you can actually order at until 8 pm tonight, not an indicative figure.

What the Grand Bazaar column means. The low and high asking price observed across several vendors on that one morning, before bargaining. It is not an average of the whole Puducherry market and it is not a government mandi rate. Somebody buying well and buying in quantity will beat the low end of that range; somebody arriving at 11 am usually will not.

What the 7-day column means. The difference against our own price for the same line seven days earlier, rounded to the rupee. A dash means it moved by less than ₹2.

What we round. Everything to the rupee. Weights are to 10 g on the scale at the packing table but a price is quoted per kilo.

What is missing, on purpose. No price we did not observe ourselves. If our buyer did not see a line at the gate or in the bazaar that morning, it does not appear that day rather than being carried forward from yesterday. That is why the row count moves between 55 and 62 through the year.

Why prices moved this week

Late September on this coast is the tail of the monsoon trough, and the table shows it in three places.

Gourds and greens are soft. Snake gourd is down ₹4, ridge gourd down ₹3, and the keerai bunches are flat at ₹14 to ₹20. July to September is when the local belt grows gourds and greens best, so supply is comfortable and the price has nowhere to go. This is the cheapest cooking in Puducherry right now and it will not be true in January.

Beans and carrot are climbing. Beans up ₹8, carrot up ₹5, cauliflower up ₹4. These are Nilgiris lines, they arrive by truck, and the hill supply is at its thinnest before the winter crop. Anything coming down from the hills will stay expensive until roughly the end of October.

Tomato and drumstick are falling. Tomato down ₹4 to ₹32 and drumstick down ₹10 to ₹90, both because the local flush arrived at the same time. Drumstick has a second season from about August to October on this coast, and we are inside it.

The pattern underneath all three: what grows here is cheap now, what is trucked in is not. That is the single most useful thing a Puducherry household can know about its vegetable bill, and it is the argument the seasonal calendar makes at length.