Billing for your fruit and vegetable shop in Jharkhand
The weight, the day's rate and the puja basket, all on one bill on your phone.
A puja basket as one line, raw groundnuts by the sack and by the kilo and a short load known by its supplier
A basket of five fruits is one line at one rate
Make a basket of five fruits an item with its own rate, and keep banana, apples and coconut as items for the customers who take them loose. A family that takes the basket is billed in one line, and the count of each fruit still goes down.
Groundnuts by the kilo for the house, by the sack for the trader
The family buys a kilo of raw groundnuts for the house, and the trader buys a sack to sell on. The two do not pay the same rate, and the trader will not pay the family's. Keep each in its own measure, and the rate each heard is the rate on its bill.
Which went first in the puja days, the cane or the gagal
In the puja days cane and gagal do not sell at the same speed. At night the report shows the kilos of each that went, beside what you held. The cane that stayed and the gagal that finished by noon decide how much of each you ask for the next time.
What the phone does where the scale sits on the ground
Bills on your phone
The day's groundnut rate fixed once on the phone, so two customers standing side by side at the sack are billed the same price.
UPI payments
A QR taped to the scale for the customer who has only a phone, with each payment matched to its bill.
Orders to suppliers
One order for the cane supplier and another for the one who sends gagal, each with the arrival noted beside it, so a short load is traced to a name.
Credit book (khata)
A page for the hotel or the hostel that takes crates through the month, each delivery a dated bill, so the total at settlement is not argued.
A stall that is half the family's plot and half the lane's, the seller with no table and limes that cannot wait for the rain
Half the stall is the family's own plot and half is bought from the lane
Some of what lies on the sacking was grown by the seller's own family and cost nothing but labour. The rest was bought at dawn from the wholesale lane. Both sell at the same counter, to the same customers, and the notebook does not know which is which.
A seller on the ground has no wall to write the rate on
Much of the vegetable trade in the market sits on sacking and a scale. The rate of the day is in the seller's head, the customer on the left hears one price and the one on the right hears another, and by evening nobody can say what was sold of the carrots.
Limes, carrots and cauliflower do not wait for the rain to stop
The load comes in at dawn from the wholesale lanes, and a day of rain can empty the road and the buyers at once. What was bought for a full market is left in the sack, and what was sold is a guess made from the cash in the pocket.
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Cane fields, wholesale lanes and forest baskets: where Jharkhand's produce comes from
Produce moves through Jharkhand by road, from the fields and the forest to the wholesale lanes and the stalls, and a seller hears the route from the people who bring it.
- The district site lists paddy and sugarcane as Palamu's main crops, and shows lac cultivation in the district.
- Chas, the suburb of Bokaro Steel City, is notable for a large wholesale market.
- Hazaribagh village trade runs on forest produce: mahua flowers, lac, kendu leaves, leaf plates (dona-pattal) and bamboo baskets, mostly through vyaparis and village sahukars.
- Ranchi, the state capital, is an important centre of trade and commerce in Jharkhand; nearby forests supply furniture, match box and paper industries.
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A farmers' group whose market stalls and online shop share one stock
Questions Jharkhand fruit and vegetable sellers ask about baskets, loads and rates
In Chhath week a buyer takes the basket and also a few loose bananas and a stalk of cane. Can all of it be on one bill?
Yes. The loose bananas and the cane are items of their own, each in the unit you sell it by. They go on the same bill as the basket, each line at its own rate.
A trader takes raw groundnuts by the sack and pays at the end of the week. Can I bill him differently from a household?
Yes. Give him a page of his own and bill the sack item at its rate. Each sack is a dated line on his page, and the household that takes a kilo is billed from the kilo item.
Carrots and cauliflower sit on the ground in heaps. How is the heap's rate set?
Set the heap's rate in the morning from what the heap cost you, and sell the heap whole at it. Loose pieces taken from a heap are weighed and charged by the kilo.
What Ranchi's Chhath markets bring in and where they sell
At Chhath, Ranchi's market gets sugarcane from Lohardaga and gagal (a citrus fruit) from Samastipur and Muzaffarpur; a wholesaler said coconuts came from Andhra Pradesh, none from West Bengal. A seller there buys from three directions for one week, and each load comes with its own rate.
During Chhath, Ranchi markets at Bakri Bazaar, Kachahri Road, Zila School and Doranda sell bananas, apples, coconut, custard apple and sugarcane for the puja. The same fruit is sold in four places on the same days, so the seller who knows his rate and his count is the one who does not lose the day.