The middle and lower middle classes and poor people are already experiencing a crippling effect on their day-to-day life due to the enduring price spiral of essentials and Iftar-related items, as the government is yet to take stern action against unscrupulous businessmen who have stockpiled various goods to raise their prices further.

The price level may continue to go up during Ramadan as government initiatives to reverse the trend are not being implemented properly, consumers pointed out.

Kitchen markets in the capital yesterday saw a marked increase in the prices of essentials and Iftar items, including soybean oil, vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, baby food, milk and spices as well as gram, aubergine, molasses, puffed rice, cucumber, date, apple and orange.

Ten mobile teams of the TCB who are to sell four essentials -- pulses, onion, sugar and gram -- at 33 places in the capital are allegedly failing to do their job properly. People who came to buy these essentials from the TCB trucks made the allegation yesterday when this correspondent asked them about the TCB drive.

The teams are not selling the goods with accurate measurement and the quantities of the goods are inadequate to meet the need, they said.

"I stood for one and a half hours in a queue and paid for one kg onion but later I found they gave me only 850 grams," said Miran Hossain at Newmarket point.

"They refused to listen to me when I went back to the team to complain about it," he regretted.

Asked about such allegations, a TCB official, seeking anonymity, said, " It is difficult to sell the goods properly due to the heavy rush of people. More teams should be engaged to sell goods and the quantities of goods should also be increased."

The OMS operation will not be a success in containing the price spiral of rice in the country unless the rice is sold at union level. Officials concerned pointed out that OMS rice is needed more in rural areas than in district towns as most of the day labourers live in the villages, where they have no work now.

The government selected around 18,000 food dealers to sell OMS rice at Tk 14.50 per kg in the cities and 64 district towns.

People reportedly show less interest in the OMS rice as it is of very bad quality but its price is close to that of rice available in the market.

In the capital's kitchen markets, the price of aubergine used in preparing beguni, a very popular Iftar item, yesterday jumped to Tk 50 --52 a kg from Tk 34 on the previous day.

Prices of other Iftar items, such as various categories of dates, ranged between Tk 80 and TK 250 per kg yesterday against Tk 45 to Tk 200 just on the previous day. Orange and pineapple yesterday sold at Tk 150 per dozen and Tk 50 per piece.

Most essentials and vegetables, whose prices shot up by at least Tk 2-12 a kg over the last week, had a fresh price hike yesterday.