KARACHI, Dec 29: The city received no consignments of vegetables and fruit on Saturday as the wholesale vegetable market remained shut for the second consecutive day.
Sources at the market, better known as the New Sabzi Mandi, said not a single truck carrying the commodities reached the city since Thursday evening.
They, however, said the market would open on Sunday morning as the situation was slowly returning to normal with scores of private vehicles appearing on the roads.
A vegetable dealer said the Mandi did not have enough stocks of vegetables and fruit to meet the city’s requirement. He said the shortage of produce was inevitable as the supplies from growers were badly affected due to the blockage of the Super Highway.
Some vegetable and fruit vendors appeared in small localities to sell the commodities at exorbitant prices. A vegetable vendor at Burnes Road said he wanted to sell the vegetables before they went rotten.
Meanwhile, few petrol pumps opened in parts of the city for brief intervals, bringing some relief to the motorists and motorcyclists. Long queues were seen at different petrol pumps where law enforcers were also present to avert any incident. However, a caller from Nazimabad informed Dawn that a petrol pump in his area was charging motorists Rs100 per litre.
Several cars queued bumper-to-bumper at least for half a kilometre for their turns at a fuel station on Sharea Faisal.
Besides, a large number of people reached petrol pumps with bottles to buy petrol as they had totally run out of fuel, and had to stand in a separate queue.
