Billing for your fruit and vegetable shop in Arunachal Pradesh
Greens by the bunch, kiwi by the crate and the families who pay later, all on one phone.
Why a hill-town fruit stall prices every load as it comes
A crate of kiwi that has to be priced before it is opened
Kiwi comes in green plastic crates, and the first crate of the season tells you nothing about the rest. Some fruit is big and firm, some small and soft, and the rate you can ask depends on which. You open the crate at the counter, sort by eye and set a price on the spot. By evening you cannot say whether the big ones or the small ones paid for the crate.
Greens and onions every few days, none of them written down
An orchard family needs greens and onions every few days through the months before the kiwi is sold. Each visit is a few bunches and a handful of onions, too small to write on its own. Added together, a week of them is a real sum, and neither you nor the family can say what it came to.
A week when the farm road is shut and the crates cannot come down
When rain closes the farm road, the kiwi and orange crates stay at the orchard and the trucks go back empty. Your shelf holds last week's fruit and the oldest cabbages. Customers ask for what they bought before and you have none. You raise a rate by feel and cannot say later what you charged or why.
The orchards of Papum Pare and the apple and kiwi slopes of West Kameng
A fruit and vegetable seller keeps an ear on the orchards, because what ripens in one district reaches a stall in another.
- Oranges, pineapple, banana, guava, litchi, large cardamom and pears are among the fruit grown across Papum Pare.
- West Kameng has apple and kiwi orchards around Dirang, Bomdila, Rupa and Shergaon.
From the first crate of the morning to the last kilo of greens
The second crate priced from what the first crate sold
The first crate of the kiwi months tells you what the second should cost. By evening, open the day and see how many kilos of the big fruit and of the small went from it. Set the second crate's rates from that, and not from the hope you had when the road brought it.
A crate priced by the kiwi grower and a basket priced on your scale
The kiwi grower names his price for a crate, and the village farmer's greens are weighed on your scale. Note each under its own farmer's name, and note what the same goods sold for through the day. At the week's end the crate and the basket can be read side by side, though they came to you by different ways.
What the kiwi months do to the rest of the shelf
When kiwi crates come in, customers who bought oranges and apples buy a little less of them. Open the days of the kiwi months beside the months before, and see which fruit gave way. You learn how much shelf the kiwi really deserves, and what to order less of beside it.
Tools for a counter that sells kiwi by the crate and greens by the bunch
Bills on your phone
A whole crate of kiwi billed as one line at one rate and sent to the buyer's WhatsApp, so a stall busy in the kiwi months does not stop to write each sale twice.
Daily reports
The kiwi kilos sold on each day of a crate, so the second crate is priced from what the first one did.
Credit book (khata)
A page for each orchard household, open from the first greens in autumn to the kiwi sale, and closed on the day the money comes.
Low stock warnings
A warning on the greens an orchard household buys every few days, so the stall is not bare before kiwi time.
Orders to suppliers
An order for the next load to the trader in the plains, with the crate counts of the last kiwi week open beside it.
A farmers' group that put its stall and its online shop in one place
Questions an Arunachal fruit and vegetable seller asks
A crate of kiwi comes unsorted, big and small mixed. Must I sort it before I bill?
Sort it as you set out the shelf, big on one side and small on the other, and bill each by its kilos. No time to sort? Sell the crate at one rate.
The road opened and a week's load came in one lump. How do I put it on the shelf?
Write the whole load against the trader's page as it arrives, each fruit with its kilos. Set out the shelf from the biggest count to the smallest, and sell the fruit that waited in the closed week first.
When the kiwi months come, the trader's load is mostly kiwi. How do I keep oranges and pineapple on the shelf?
Order the oranges and pineapple from the trader early, in their own kilos, and note on his page what really came. The shelf then shows how far the kiwi pushed the other fruit out.
A traveller takes a mixed crate of kiwi and oranges down to the plains. How do I put both fruits on one bill?
Add the kiwi by the kilo and the oranges by the kilo as two items, each with its own rate, and put both on the one bill. The stock of each fruit comes off its own count, so the kiwi is not counted as oranges.
The April 2020 shortage and the kiwi months
Arunachal markets depend partly on vegetable shipments from Assam. When these stopped in April 2020, the capital faced an acute shortage, while rural produce reached district towns. A seller who buys from a village farmer and a seller who waits for a truck see the same week in very different ways, and each keeps a different kind of stock.
Arunachal Pradesh's kiwi harvest season runs from November to January, and the state produces over 50 percent of India's kiwi. In those months crates of kiwi fill the shelf and the price moves with the crop, so a stall that sells it learns every year how many crates it can really sell before the season ends.