PESHAWAR, Dec 26: The provincial government has failed to save the people from profiteers and black-marketers, as prices of a 20kg bag of flour witnessed a surge of Rs15-20 in the city’s commodity market on the first trading day after Eid holidays.

Dealers at the main Rampura market told Dawn that a 20kg bag of inferior quality flour, which was available at Rs390-400 before Eidul Azha, was being sold at Rs420-430 at the wholesale level on Wednesday.

They said the increase was mainly because the prices of wheat in the open market of Punjab had surged manifold. A 100kg bag of wheat was sold at Rs2,100 on Wednesday in Punjab.

According to them, the Punjab government was issuing a daily quota of subsidised wheat to the mills for local consumption, while flour millers were purchasing wheat from the open market at higher prices for the NWFP and Afghanistan.

Haji Rambeel Khan, president of the NWFP Food Grain Dealers Association, said that flour millers in Punjab had stopped making fresh deals because of the new surge in wheat prices.

He said that prices would further go up in the days to come.

The NWFP caretaker government has increased the daily quota of wheat from 1,500 tons to 2,800 tons for the local mills which are bound to sell flour at Rs310 per 20kg at fair price shops.

However, Mr Rambeel alleged that instead of supplying the specified quantity of flour bags to the fair price shops, the millers were exporting the commodity to Afghanistan.

Thirty fair price shops have been set up in Peshawar where each mill is supposed to distribute 300 flour bags of 20kg on a daily basis. He said that Afghanistan was an ideal destination for the local flour millers where they got extra profits. He said that a flour bag of 85kg, which was available at Rs2,100-2,300 in the local market, was being sold at Rs3,000 in Jalalabad. The federal government has recently imposed a 25 per cent regulatory duty on flour export to Afghanistan to discourage the cross-border movement of the commodity.

According to the market sources, over 40 trucks loaded with flour crossed the border at Torkham daily.