Until now, the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India and National Cooperative Consumers’ Federation of India Ltd – the two procurement agencies for pulses and onions – were making the payments to farmer federations or cooperatives, which in turn were paying the farmers. This process has been time consuming and so the government is planning to replace it with direct benefit transfer (DBT).
“This will help encourage farmers to grow tur and onion and increase the area under cultivation for these two crops,” said the official, who did not want to be named.
Increasing the acreage will help boost production and reduce dependence on imports, the official said, adding: “Due to heavy reliance on imports, countries like Mozambique and Burma (Myanmar) are dictating terms to us.”
The acreage under these two crops shrank during the kharif season, leading to a production shortage and adding to food inflation in the last few months.
The area under tur dropped to about 4.39 million hectares as on September 29, 2023 from over 4.61 million hectares a year earlier, according to government’s data.Retail inflation in pulses as a category accelerated to 18.79% in October, mainly due to a sharp spike in the prices of tur, chana and moong, despite the Centre’s effort to increase imports from Africa and Myanmar by scrapping the import duty on tur in March. Onion prices shot up soon after Navratri and went up to ₹85 per kg in some markets on account of a short supply, as the sowing of kharif onions in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh was slow.In August, the government imposed a 40% export duty on onions, after the prices started climbing. However, rampant under-invoicing of exports undermined the duty, prompting the Centre to scrap the duty and impose a minimum export price of $800 per tonne on onions between October 29 and December 31.