New Delhi || 12-11-2024 A delegation led by Maxim Titov, Deputy Minister of Russian Ministry of Agriculture met Nidhi Khare, Secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs on 11 November, 2024. Both the side discussed measures to enhance cooperation in the field of trade in pulses.
Russia has emerged as a major source of India’s import of masur(lentils) and yellow peas from recent past. Apart from these two pulses, Russia is also contemplating to diversify its pulses production to urad(black matpe) and tur(pigeon pea).
A gradual, but significant easing of supply situation in respect of major pulses like tur, urad and chana are observed from July, 2024 with encouraging kharif prospect and continuous imports. Tur crop is reported to be good and early harvest of tur crop in pockets of Karnataka have started.
The overall availability of pulses has been comfortable with robust inflow of imports of tur, urad, chana and yellow peas, this year. Tur and urad imports for calendar year, 2024 at 10 LMT and 6.40 LMT, respectively by first week of November have already exceeded the whole year import figures during last year.
The arrival of chana imports from Australia in bulk cargoes are expected from November. The recent diversification of source countries for pulses played an important role in ensuring continuous inflows at increasingly competitive rates.
Meanwhile, the preliminary reports of rabi sowing for chana, masur, urad and moong indicates that initial delay in some states due to prolonged rains are now recovering the lag in area coverage. Overall sentiment and sowing intention are reported to be upbeat because of good price realization.
The government has decided to upscale the onion disposal in order to address temporary constraint in onion supply observed in certain markets in the past 2/3 days owing to festival season and closure mandis.
NAFED has indented two more rakes for Delhi-NCR and one for Guwahati this week. Similarly, dispatch through road transport would also be upscaled to ensure availability of onions in the market.
The availability of onions would be further accentuated by more supplies from NCCF, both through rail and road transport. Additionally, the government has also decided to offload onions kept in cold storage at Sonipat to meet the requirements of Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Himachal, J&K, Delhi etc.
The government is alive to the market developments and keeping close watch to take ameliorative action to stabilize the onion prices.
