Commerce State Minister Ahsanul Islam Titu said that the train will arrive in Bangladesh tonight with onions from India. One thousand 650 tons of onions will arrive in the first shipment.

He said these things at the end of the task force meeting on 'commodity price and market situation review' in the conference room of the Ministry of Commerce at the Secretariat on Sunday (March 31).

State Minister Ahsanul Islam Titu said that since onion is a perishable product, 1,650 metric tons of onion will arrive in the first train. These onions will be sold in Dhaka and Chittagong through Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB) at the rate of Tk 40 per kg. The rest of the imported onions will also come to the country gradually.

A proposal to import 50,000 metric tons of onions from India was given in-principle approval in a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs held on Wednesday (March 27) under the chairmanship of Finance Minister Abul Hasan Mahmud Ali.

In August last year, the government imposed a 40 percent tariff on onion exports to ensure normal supply to the Indian market. Then last October, the minimum export price of onion was set at 800 US dollars per ton. But since these measures were not very effective to increase the supply of onion in the domestic market, the Indian government completely stopped onion export on December 7.

India's Directorate General of Foreign Trade has imposed a ban on onion exports till March 31 this year. After India's ban, the price of onion in the Bangladesh market has suddenly increased. At the retail level, the price of chopped onion rose up to Tk 140 per kg.