Imphal, September 28: There have been stories about faulty weights used by fish vendors.

There have been stories about shops selling adulterated and expired goods and recently the Senapati District Consumers Club launched a crackdown and seized a number of expired goods from shops in the district headquarters while another hardware store was earlier fined for selling cement at a price higher than the market rate.

Now it is about how the people have been sytematically cheated by cement traders. All the cement that comes to Manipur from factories outside the State are packed in 50 kg bags but chances are that for each bag that one buys, the 50 kg bag will not weigh 50 kgs at all as there is a racket in place where the cement is taken out from each bag and then sold in the loose.

The Sangai Express decided to survey the market following complaints from one aggrieved consumer who had been buying the 50 kg bag cement but found later that each bag weighed less than 40 kg ! The cement being sold in the market of Manipur are broadly categorised into grade-33, grade-43 and grade-53.Some of the branded cements include Bokajan, Star, Suraksha, Century etc.

All these brands come in 50 kg bags.

The point is, many of the consumers do not take the trouble of checking the weights of the cement bags and are satisfied to go by the printed weight on the bag which is 50 kgs.

A proprietor/manager of store at Thangal bazar informed The Sangai Express that the companies send the cement bags with the exact weight printed on the bags.

The store said that since they sell the cement bags as they are received from the companies without any tampering, they sell the same at a higher price than the other stores.

The store admitted that a number of small time traders who sell cement all over Imphal do pilfer the cement from the 50 bags and sell them to the gullible public as 50 kg cement bags.

The quantity pilfered range from 3 to 5 kgs per bag.

Another interesting point is no two shops in Imphal sell the same brand of cement at the same price.

For example a cement bag of Bokajan sells for Rs 235 at one shop while at another shop the same is sold at Rs 240.In some cases the same brand is sold at Rs 230 per bag.

For Government supply, the price of each bag is approximately Rs 227/228. A cement shopkeeper at Uripok explained that the price fluctuates at each shop because of the all pervading culture of pilfering cement from the bags originally bought from the companies.

Pilfering the cement from each bag is not a hard task.

A trader who has just received his truckload of cement first ensures that all the cement bags are deposited at the godown.

Then at night the nefarious activities of pilfering the cement from the bags received from the companies are carried out.

The next morning the cement bags are sold with the printed weight on it.

There are specialists who are hired to pilfer the cement from the bags who charge a certain amount of money for the service rendered.

The practice of pilfering cement from the bags is known amongst the cement traders.

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