Just as onions left many crying, it is now the turn of pulses (dal). The price of the poor man’s staple has doubled and there is no visible measures to check its spiraling growth. While India has reached self-sufficiency in many food items, which includes milk, rice and wheat, it has not been able to do the same with pulses. Approximately an annual import bill of $2.6 billion is incurred by India only on pulses. If this amount were to reach our farmers, they may never think of leaving farming – leave alone committing suicide. Lack of policies or clarity on agriculture planning has led to this crisis which is not going to abate in the near future. India is facing a crisis because of deficient rainfall. But we cannot blame this alone for this crisis. We already have a huge pulses’ deficit and this kharif season will make matters worse. If you compare the retail price of tur dal, it was Rs 76 in June 2014 and it peaked to Rs 101 in June 2015 and now it stands at around Rs 170. The case is also the same with urad dal. To make matters worse, kharif output of pulses has fallen 21 per cent over the past four years, to 5.63 million tonnes in 2014-15. Crisis is mainly in tur and urad dals, two of the most consumed pulses, as total pulses’ production dipped to 17.2 million tonnes last year against 19.25 million tonnes in the previous year. Domestic production may be just 17 mt against the demand of 27 mt. Pulses production in India has shown less than 40 per cent growth and this has led to almost halving the per capita availability to 30 grams now. So this precisely means the prices are doubling at an alarmingly low periodicity. This Minimum Support Price mechanism is also not transparent and depends on various political factors. It has nothing to do with demand and supply or simple economics. Some of the lentils do come under MSP but they are not attractive enough for farmers to concentrate merely on pulses.
