Tags:
Journalism of Courage
During the last 10 years, India’s production of pulses has gone up about 50%, from 18.3 million tonnes (mt) to 27.5 mt. Much of this has been from just two crops: Chana (chickpea) and moong (green gram).
Between 2012-13 and 2022-23, chana’s output has risen from 8.8 mt to 13.5 mt and the latter’s from a mere 1.2 mt to 3.7 mt (see chart). The two together now account for 62.8% of the country’s total pulses production, as against 54.6% in 2012-13 and 45.9% in 2002-03.
What explains the significantly increased production of these two pulses, and not so much of others such as arhar/tur (pigeon-pea) and urad (black gram)?
MSP procurement factor in chana
In chana, the stimulus has come not only from a hike in its minimum support price (MSP), from Rs 3,000 per quintal in 2012-13 to Rs 5,335 in 2022-23, but also government agencies undertaking procurement at these official rates.
Chana purchases by the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) in the last 3-4 years have amounted to 2-2.5 mt, close to a fifth of the estimated output of this rabi (winter) season pulses crop. MSP-based procurement has incentivised farmers to expand the area planted under it from around 8.5 million to over 11 million hectares (mh) in the last 10 years. There has been no similar effort at procuring other pulses, barring in one or two years (see table).
But it isn’t procurement alone.
According to Shailesh Tripathi, head of the All-India Coordinated Research Project for Rabi Pulses, chana was a crop mainly grown in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. With the Green Revolution and spread of irrigation, an estimated 4-4.5 mh area under chana in these states got diverted to wheat and mustard. However, the area lost in the North was made up by acreage gains in Central (Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat) and South (Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) India.
That, in turn, was enabled by the breeding of short-duration chana varieties, sown from end-September to mid-October, after harvesting of the kharif (post-monsoon) crop and using the residual moisture left by it in the soil. These varieties are harvested in 100-120 days with farmers having to give a single irrigation, if at all. This is unlike the chana grown over 140-150 days in the North, requiring 1-2 irrigations.
“The short-duration varieties (such as JAKI 9218, JG 11, JG 16, Vijay and Phule Vikram) yield 20-25 quintals per hectare. That’s below the 25-30 quintals from the traditional long-duration varieties, but they take lesser time to grow with hardly any irrigation,” said Tripathi. Breeding them has involved reducing the sowing-to-harvest period (so that the crop experiences no moisture stress during the terminal pod-filling stage) and increasing the grain/seed size and number of pods per plant.
The moong revolution
The real breeding breakthroughs, though, have been in moong, where farmers take as many as four crops.
The first one is the kharif crop, grown over 65-75 days, with sowing from end-June to mid-July and harvesting after mid-September. Kharif moong cultivation is mostly in Rajasthan, UP, Punjab and Haryana. The crop needs no irrigation. Farmers prefer to sow in the first fortnight of July, so that the pod-filling and maturity period does not coincide with peak rainfall during August.
“Kharif moong yields are 12-15 quintals/hectare and higher, at 15-18 quintals, in the non-canal areas of north Rajasthan (Sri Ganganagar and Hanumangarh districts). While paddy or cotton cannot be grown, the heavy soils there have good water retention capacity. The moisture gets slowly released into the plants, unlike in light soils, where it escapes into the lower profiles,” noted GP Dixit, director of the Kanpur-based Indian Institute of Pulses Research (IIPR).
The second crop is during rabi, grown largely in the southern states and Odisha. The sowing is in November-December after paddy is harvested. The third is the spring moong, sown during February-March post the harvesting of potato and sugarcane in states such as Punjab and UP. It is also taken as an inter-crop with sugarcane, being harvested by May and the latter continuing to grow on the same land well beyond that time.
The fourth crop is summer moong, sown after harvesting of wheat in Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar and the irrigated Narmada belt of MP covering Harda and Hoshangabad. The sowing window is short from April 1-20 and the crop has to be harvested in 50-60 days time before the monsoon rain. The summer and rabi moong are generally of shorter duration, while longer (up to 75 days) in the case of kharif and spring.
“In moong, our success has been in breeding photo-thermo insensitive varieties. Since these are not sensitive either to temperature or photoperiod (the length of time in 24 hours that plants are exposed to light), they can virtually be grown anytime and anywhere,” explained Dixit. IIPR has bred IPM 02-03, a moong variety amenable to both kharif and spring planting. Similar success stories are the summer moong varieties Samrat and Virat, maturing in 55-60 days.
The trebling of moong production in the last 10 years has been primarily courtesy of spring and summer varieties, which account for more than half of this crop’s total output today.
Limitations of other pulses
Till around 2018-19, chana was India’s largest produced pulses crop, followed by arhar/tur and urad. Chana remains at the top, but moong has raced ahead of the others to take the No. 2 spot.
The reasons are simple. Chana and moong have both emerged as commercial crops for farmers. MSP procurement has led chana to replace rabi jowar (sorghum) in states such as Maharashtra, just as good rains in the last few years have prompted Rajasthan’s farmers to switch from moth bean and guar (cluster bean) to moong. The advantage with moong is that it is a short-duration crop and can be grown in multiple seasons.
Compare this to arhar/tur, which was traditionally grown as a 250-270 days crop in eastern UP and Bihar, yielding a little over 20 quintals per hectare. As these areas have gradually given way to paddy with the advent of irrigation, arhar/tur cultivation is now concentrated in the rainfed regions of Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, where farmers have few options.
Scientists have managed to reduce the crop’s duration to 150-180 days with 15-16 quintals/hectare yields. But that’s still comparatively long and low. Efforts are now on breeding hybrids maturing within 140-150 days and giving 18-20 quintals/hectare. The future of arhar/tur probably lies there.
