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Informist, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024

 

By Pallavi Singhal

 

NEW DELHI – Faced with a huge surplus of moong dal and masur dal, the Centre is finding it tough to find buyers, a senior government official told Informist. "While the norms require us to hold 500,000 tonnes of buffers for each of these pulses, we had procured more to compensate for the low stocks of other pulses such as tur and urad," the official said.

 

According to the official, the Department of Consumer Affairs currently has about 900,000 tonnes of masur dal and around 700,000 tonnes of moong dal. "Now, we have been trying to offload our stocks via National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India but it has found few buyers," he said. Bidders at such auctions have to bid for a minimum of 200 tonnes and can only bid up to a maximum of 2,000 tonnes, according to the rules.

 

Buffer stocks help the government to ease extreme price fluctuations by regulating supply and demand dynamics in the market.

 

The department has not been able to procure tur and chana this year due to lower production and record high prices of the two key pulses. Currently, the Department of Consumer Affairs has zero stock of tur and about 150,000 tonnes of chana all of which has already been earmarked for the government's Bharat Dal scheme.

"While we have been unable to find a market for moong and masur stocks, we at least have the assurance that traders cannot manipulate market prices. That was essentially why these buffers were made," the official said. Regarding concerns about quality degradation due to prolonged storage, he said, "if we store them as whole moong and masur, there is an issue of a fall in quality. However, we get them processed before storing, thus extending their shelf life."

 

On Friday, wholesale prices of moong and masur were hovering below the minimum support prices of INR 8,682 per 100 kg and INR 6,700 per kg, respectively. Moong was being sold at INR 7,000-8,000 per 100 kg in Kalaburagi, Karnataka, and masur at INR 6,000 per 100 kg in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.  End

 

Edited by Ashish Shirke

 

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