Atmanirbhar thali: Govt is bringing self-sufficiency to dining table
food inflation in India as analysts track food inflation with thali prices. Persistent food inflation has made the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) hard in large measure due to prices of vegetables which are perishable in nature and also subject to vagaries of weather which have been made worse by climate change. Another item on the thali which keeps its price high is pulses, especially tur (also called arhar) dal which India imports in large measure. In June, prices of pulses surged 21.64% year-on-year, more than double the 9.21% increase seen a year ago, according to government data. India imported all major pulses, including tur, urad, masoor, chana and yellow peas, in 2023-24 due to low domestic production on account of erratic rainfall, spending around $3.74 billion during the financial year.
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Now the government is trying to become self-sufficient in pulses. It has identified 35 new districts for increasing cultivation of tur and 13 districts for urad for bringing more area under coverage of the two kharif (summer) pulses where it will distribute high-yielding varieties of seeds, ET has reported.
In February, when farmers from Punjab were gathering on the borders with Haryana for a legal guarantee on minimum support price (MSP) for all crops, the Central government had promised assured purchase of pulses. The proposal to purchase the entire quantities of masoor, urad and arhar would not only have been an effective way to break the vicious cycle of wheat-paddy cultivation and also ensured price support to the farmers who
