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NEW DELHI— On Saturday night, Mintu Chottelal, 30, a truck driver, and his helper, Rinku Gujjar, 19, were driving along the Delhi-Jaipur Highway on their way from the town of Nagore in Rajasthan to the town of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. Suddenly, a minivan came to a halt in front of them. Three men jumped off the vehicle, overpowered Mr. Chottelal and Mr. Gujjar, and drove away with their loot.

They did not get far. About an hour later, the Rajasthan police chased them down and recovered the truck, which carried 9,000 kilograms of onions.

“I have never heard of anything like this before,” Bhawani Singh, a police officer at the Shahpura station, said in a phone interview, “but onion prices are so high, it makes sense.”

The three onion robbers managed to escape and are still at large, according to Ram Kishore, a subinspector at the Shapura station, where the driver of the truck had lodged a complaint.

At prevailing onion prices, the stash would be worth anywhere from 500,000 to 700,000 rupees (between $7,779 and $10,880).

According to official figures released in July this year, the price of the onions has risen more than 100 percent from June last year. Last week as the capital got busy with Independence Day celebrations, the price of onions hit 80 rupees per kilogram ($1.25), in some parts of the country, spawning speculations that it would cross the 100-rupee mark.

Anaro Devi, a 70-year-old vegetable seller in central Delhi, who is already selling green chilies at 100 rupees a kilogram, says she has never seen such a steep rise in vegetable prices. This week, Ms. Devi said, she sold four to five kilograms of onions daily at 60 rupees per kilogram.

Onion prices fell to 60 rupees per kilogram this week in the capital, following a slew of measures announced by the central and Delhi state governments to rein in soaring prices.

The chief minister of Delhi on Monday said at a news conference that there was no onion shortage.

Ms. Devi laid the blame for skyrocketing prices on wholesalers. “The wholesalers are deliberately hoarding the onions so that prices go up,” she said. “The rich don’t know anything, it is the poor who are left to suffer.”

Last week, the government announced that it would be procuring onions directly from the major wholesale markets in Rajasthan and Maharashtra, two major onion-producing states in the country.

Despite the fact that India is the second-largest producer of onions after China, the government said in August that the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India would begin importing onions.



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In the capital, the soaring price of onions has ignited a political contest between the ruling Congress Party and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which have been aggressively campaigning for state assembly elections in November.

“Ours is a sensitive government,” Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of New Delhi, said at a news conference on Monday. “Hence, it acted swiftly on taking note of soaring onion prices.”

“Outlets arranged by the city government have been selling onions around 45 rupees per kilogram,” she added.

The Bharatiya Janata Party this week opened special stalls to sell onions at rates significantly lower than the market price, in a bid to embarrass the government.

The party also found unusual ways of protesting the spiraling onion prices. Earlier last week, one party member deposited onions at a local bank, according to media reports. This week, on the occasion of Raksha Bandhan, a Hindu festival celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters, the party gave onions to women who tied Rakhi, the sacred thread symbolizing the bond, to a Delhi Bharatiya Janata leader, Sunil Yadav.

Ms. Dikshit accused the opposition of “politicizing the issue” with “gimmicks.”

But the escalating price of onions was one of the factors that led to the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata state government in New Delhi in 1998 elections.

“The Congress Party, then the opposition, used the issue well to defeat us in the assembly elections,” said Anil Jain, a party secretary.

For some people, the onion price increase seems to be an issue of public safety.

Last Wednesday, a trader in the capital was attacked, ostensibly for selling onions at a price lower than the market rate, as part of the Delhi government’s plan.

Kajal Gurung, a 44-year-old New Delhi homemake, is not surprised by the highway onion robbery.

“With the prices soaring so high, an incident like this was just waiting to happen,” she said in a telephone interview. “A bag of onions in my hand has a greater chance of being stolen than a ring or a bracelet.”