He said that the importers have already contracted 25 lakh tonnes of pulses for delivery till January and about 2.5 lakh tonnes are lying at ports. “Any kind of restriction would dry the pipeline”, said Pravin Dongre, chairman of the Indian Pulses and Grain Association, a Mumbai-based trade body, after meeting Jaitley. This takes the total seizure of pulses so far to 50,656.79 tonnes following 3149 raids across 10 states.
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The state governments were exhorted to carry out surprise inspections and raids to prevent hoarding.
When the pulses crisis escalated, the Centre brought importers, exporters, departmental stores and licenced food processors under the stock holding limit to check hoarding even as it looked at imports to boost supplies. He said the association had offered supply of 100 tonnes of imported tur dal at Rs. 135 per kg daily to the government agencies.
About 36,000 tonne of pulses have been recovered from raids conducted recently, he said adding pulses recovered from raids will be offloaded into the market.
According to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, of the 15,335.95 tonnes of pulses recovered on Friday, 7,033 tonnes was seized from Maharashtra, 5,487.74 tonnes from Karnataka, 2,051 tonnes from Rajasthan and 764.07 tonnes from Haryana.
There were a series of meetings by the government chaired by Mr. Jaitley as well as Union Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha on Friday to take stock of the situation.
Pulses prices have risen across the country due to shortfall in domestic output by 2 million tonnes in 2014-15 due to poor rains.
Officials say the government is planning to create a buffer stock of about 500,000 tonnes, purchasing it directly from growers. An acute shortage in the global markets has seen imported tur prices double to $1,400 a tonne from $700 a tonne past year. On Friday, the maximum retail price of tur dal (pigeon pea) was Rs. 210 per kg while average for the country was Rs. 175 per kg-more than twice the price previous year.
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Earlier this month, minister of state for agriculture Sanjeev Balyan had announced a plan to purchase about 40,000 tonnes of pulses directly from farmers, for sale at a later date. Today, the wholesale price of tur is Rs. 178 per kg while urad is Rs. 154 per kg. In several retail markets, tur is priced at Rs. 200 per kg while urad is sold at Rs. 198 per kg.
