Can India become ‘atmanirbhar’ in pulses by 2027 or is it a pipedream?

Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, India imported between 7% and 9% of its annual requirement of pulses for both households and industrial uses. In 2023-24, however, the import requirement of pulses almost doubled to 16%. This came on the back of two years of falling domestic production, precipitated by weak rainfall.

Assuming a growth in per capita income of 5.1% per annum over the next five years (higher than the average growth in the last decade), demand for pulses will grow by around 2% per annum over the next five years, estimates a 2023 Nabard Research Study paper. 

The good news is that the average growth rate of pulses production over the last 10 years has been higher, at around 2.4% per annum. The bad news is that even as late as 2030-31, India would need to import around 4.59 million tonnes of pulses, a fraction lower than what was imported in 2023-24, but well above the average imports in previous years. 

For India to completely close its import gap by 2027-28, domestic production would need to grow by 6.6% per annum till then. That is 2.75 times the current growth of pulses production.

Soaring prices

While there is reason to be circumspect about imports ending by 2027, it’s still a worthwhile goal in the long term. India is one of the world’s biggest consumers of pulses. Its purchases on the world market can move prices and influence planting decisions in other countries. This introduces a high level of uncertainty in prices for households and industry, making the inflation rate for pulses volatile. Post-April 2023, it has exceeded both overall inflation and food inflation.

One problem is that India has alternated between clamping down sharply on imports when domestic production has been high and opening it up during weak production. “… a production shortfall in India… has the potential to create dramatic increases in pulse prices without ample pulse supply in the global marketplace," pointed out the authors of a 2022 paper by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on the Indian policy for the pulses market.

Area challenge

There are only two ways to sustainably increase pulse production (setting aside extraordinary years when rains are good). The first is to expand the area under production. The area under pulses has grown at an average rate of 1.5% over the last decade, though it has declined in recent years.

As the IFPRI paper points out, the period after the green revolution saw a major expansion in the acreage of wheat and rice, which came at the expense of pulses. “Over time, pulses have been crowded out by cereals, and by the late-2000s about 87% of pulses’ cultivation had been pushed out from irrigated to rainfed areas, making them a high-risk crop for farmers," say the authors. 

Reversing this was a tall order. Under the National Food Security Mission, launched in 2007, production of pulses did increase. And underlying that production increase was an increase in acreage.

Pulses yield

The other way to increase overall pulses production is by increasing productivity—harvest more crop from the same area. In this regard too, there is good news. Pulses productivity has increased steadily over the last few decades, at an average growth of 2.3% per annum. In spite of this, India’s pulses yield, in kg per hectare, is well behind the world’s major pulse producers.

For India to meet its entire pulses requirement domestically by 2027-28, and over the same average acreage devoted to pulses as in the last 10 years, its productivity would have to increase from around 907 kg per hectare in 2023-24 to around 1,128 kg per hectare in 2027-28. That is an increase of 25% in three years. 

Ultimately, an increase in pulses production over the long term will require both more farmers to grow pulses than currently, and for those farmers to do it more efficiently.

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