He also found fault with the government's decision to distribute onions through Civil Supplies Department trucks in residential localities, than through ration shops against the ration cards. This, he said, created a scarcity scare among the people and pushed up the demand. Singh said that the Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde's statement blaming the cooperative import-export canalising agency Nafed and its chairman for the onion `fiasco' was `unfair'.

Hegde had said that Singh, a Congress politician from Bihar, had deliberately delayed procurement and import of onions by the Nafed to tarnish the image of the BJP among the voters going to the Assembly polls.

According to the Nafed chairman, he had subsequently called on the Commerce Minister and explained the factual position on onion-handling by the cooperative agency. Hegde had accepted his explanation and put the blame on officials for the `misinformation'.

Singh said that the agency was asked to procure 10,000 tonnes of onions, partly through imports, on September 20. The agency approached the Commerce Ministry the very next day for the necessary import permit but the actual permit was granted by the Ministry only on October 10. Meanwhile, the `panic announcements of airlifting' by Delhi ministers pushed up the prices in Dubai onion market from Dollars 235 to Dollars 350 a tonne.

The chairman said that the Nafed has already delivered 8,000 tonnes of the contracted onions to the Delhi Civil Supplies department. The remaining 2,000 tonnes have not been lifted from the Nafed warehouses, he pointed out. Singh added that the government has not yet acted upon the shortage of onion seeds for the next year and the creation of onion storage infrastructure with farmers to avoid easy perishability.