Delhi has promised to buy every tur, urad and masoor a farmer offers, at a guaranteed price, and to make the country self-reliant in pulses by the end of the decade. It is also importing those same pulses duty-free, in quantities that pushed the home crop below the price it guaranteed—a reading of the first year.
When the Supreme Court took up a petition about yellow peas in March 2026, the Chief Justice said the thing the policy documents will not. A wheat farmer, Surya Kant, knows the government will buy his crop at a price fixed in advance. A pulse farmer carries his sacks from one trader to the next in the mandi, hoping. That is the problem in a sentence, and it has been the problem for as long as India has grown pulses. The petition, brought by the Kisan Mahapanchayat, was nominally about whether the Centre should continue to allow yellow peas to be duty-free. Underneath it sat a harder question the bench was too careful about the limits of its own writ to answer: why a government that had just launched a mission to stop importing pulses was, at the same moment, importing them by the shipload and watching the domestic price fall through the floor.
The Court did what courts do with economic policy. It declined to interfere, issued no directions, and told the Union in the gentlest available language to go away and reconcile the contradiction between its left hand and its right.
The Mission at issue is the Mission for Aatmanirbharta in Pulses, announced in the February 2025 Budget, cleared by the Cabinet that October with Rs 11,440 crore behind it and six years to run, and a self-sufficiency deadline the government cannot keep straight, given variously as 2027, 2028-29 and 2029 for a scheme that ends in 2030-31. Its Centre of gravity is one promise. For four years, NAFED and NCCF will buy all the tur, urad and masoor that registered farmers bring to them, at the minimum support price. The seed kits, the thousand processing units, the talk of clusters across 489 districts, all of it is decoration around that single commitment, because that commitment is the only part of the scheme that can change what a farmer decides to plant.
It is a good promise. It is also one of the Indian states that have made these exact crops before, and broken.
What assured procurement has meant for pulses
The support-price machinery works, genuinely and at scale, for two crops, and they are not pulses. In a normal recent year, the state buys roughly nine-tenths of Punjab's rice and three-quarters of its wheat. Pulses have never come close. In 2020-21, the Food Corporation took in around sixty million tonnes of rice and forty-three million tonnes of wheat; the agency tasked with pulses managed about two-thirds of a million. That gap holds in fat years and lean ones. It is structural, and it showed most clearly in the year the system was tested hardest.
In 2015-16, a tur shortage drove retail prices toward two hundred rupees a kilo, the government appealed to farmers to plant more, and they did. The next year, the crop came in, the price collapsed, and the procurement agencies were supposed to step in and hold the floor. They bought, that rabi season, fourteen per cent of what they had set out to buy: nineteen thousand tonnes of masur against a target of a lakh, fifty-one thousand tonnes of chana against four lakh. The guarantee disappeared at exactly the moment farmers needed it, which is to say, when prices were low, which is the only moment a price guarantee means anything.
So the real test of the new Mission is whether anything has changed that would make the state keep a promise it has broken before. The first year suggests not.
A hundred tonnes in Bihar
In April 2026, the government launched what it called the first structured pulse procurement in Bihar under the new Mission, with a target of thirty-two thousand tonnes of masoor. Six weeks in, it had bought a hundred tonnes. Not a hundred thousand. A hundred, from fifty-nine farmers. The portals, the cooperative societies meant to aggregate the crop, the warehouses, were being assembled while the buying season ran out from under them. Chhattisgarh's chana numbers were larger and still a fraction of the target. This is what a procurement guarantee looks like on first contact with the ground: an announcement, a target, and a rounding error of actual grain.
Some of that is money. A standing commitment to buy whatever quantity farmers choose to grow is open-ended by design, and open-ended commitments are dear. The Mission's entire outlay is Rs 11,440 crore over six years, under two thousand crore a year, which does not begin to cover a real guarantee on three crops grown across most of the country. What the budget covers is the appearance of a guarantee, until the season comes when farmers test it and the agencies, as in 2017, quietly fail to appear. And the wheat-and-rice system the Mission wants to copy took half a century to build and rests on a thing pulses lack: a public distribution system that eats the grain the state buys. Nobody has said where a state-procured mountain of tur would go.
The import gate
All the while, the import gate stood open.
Figure 1. India's pulses imports by year, in lakh tonnes. Source: DGCIS, Ministry of Commerce and Industry (fiscal years); 2024-25 provisional, calendar-2024 basis. Compiled by the author.
India's pulse imports do not so much trend as lurch, and the shape of that lurching is the giveaway. They peaked near 66 lakh tonnes in 2016-17, fell away through 2018 to 2021 as domestic output recovered, then climbed back to 47 lakh tonnes in 2023-24 and to around 66 lakh tonnes in 2024, with yellow peas alone close to 2.9 million tonnes. The bill ran from 1.83 billion dollars in 2013-14 to about 5.5 billion in 2024-25. Mordecai Ezekiel named the engine behind this in 1938: a high price one year pulls farmers in; next year's glut sends the price down; they retreat; the shortage returns, and round it goes. Pulses run that loop every two or three years, and cheap imports deepen every downswing.
To keep food inflation down, the Centre had thrown the gates wide open. Yellow peas, tur, urad, and masoor were allowed duty-free; the window was extended and extended again. Canadian and Russian peas landed in bulk, and the predictable thing happened: the domestic price of every major pulse sank below its support price, with the petitioners before the Supreme Court reckoning that farmers were getting a fifth to a quarter less than the MSP. The government reimposed a duty on yellow peas only in November 2025, after farmers had already made their rabi planting decisions against a glutted market.
This is the oldest reflex in food policy. Anne Krueger, Maurice Schiff and Alberto Valdés traced it across dozens of developing countries. When the urban consumer's grocery bill collides with the farmer's price, the farmer loses, and usually loses through the indirect route of trade policy rather than any open decision to hurt him. One arm of the government was promising farmers a remunerative price for pulses. Another was making sure the market price stayed below it. The two policies were presumably drafted by people who work in the same building.
Why do farmers stay with paddy?
I want to go past the contradiction, because even a coherent mission, one that closed the import gate when domestic procurement opened, would hit two things no procurement promise can touch.
Farmers in the grain belt are not staying with rice and wheat for want of a better pitch on pulses. They stay because rice and wheat carry the one thing pulses lack: a certain buyer at a known price, and because agronomy punishes the switch. Ashok Gulati points out that paddy takes twenty-two or twenty-three irrigations to a pulse crop's three, and the farmer grows it anyway, because the water is nearly free, the price is assured, and the risk belongs to someone else. Ramesh Chand of NITI Aayog supplies the number the Mission's boosters skip: move an acre from paddy to pulses, and the output on that acre roughly halves. Asking a farmer to take a fifty per cent cut in physical yield in return for a price promise the state has broken before is not a trade many will make. Chand's own remedy, paying farmers directly per hectare to diversify rather than routing everything through the price of a single crop, is at least honest about what shifting people off paddy would cost.
I have made a version of this case before, about labour rather than crops, in The Road That Runs Back. An economy where workers are not leaving farming and, in some years, are walking back into it cannot afford to keep its thirstiest and least diversified cropping pattern frozen in place by guaranteeing a market for that pattern and nothing else. Pulses are one of the few exits on offer. The Mission points to the exit and funds a seed kit.
The yield problem
The second thing the promise cannot reach is yield, and the Mission's own arithmetic hands the point over.
Figure 2. Pulse yield in kilograms per hectare: India in 2023-24, the Mission's 2030-31 target, and Canada. Source: Directorate of Pulses Development and NITI Aayog; Mission targets; Directorate of Pulses Development global scenario. Compiled by the author.
Getting from 242 to 350 lakh tonnes depends partly on planting more land, much of it marginal rice-fallow that yields whatever the rain allows, and partly on lifting yields from 881 to 1,130 kilos per hectare. Grant them the second number. India would then be growing pulses at a little over half the yield Canada manages, the country it buys its lentils from. Between 1961 and the mid-2010s, while Green Revolution seed and irrigation pushed cereal output up by 239 per cent, pulses rose by 29 per cent. Six decades of effort have not cracked the yield, and nothing in Rs 11,440 crore over six years resembles the long, dull, sustained breeding and extension work that cracking it would take. Self-sufficiency reached by ploughing up more marginal land is self-sufficiency that the next drought repossesses.
Protein and affordability
There is a fourth thing the Mission is quietly expected to deliver: to feed people. Pulses are where India's poor and its very large vegetarian population get their protein, and somewhere in the official case is the assumption that growing more dal means more dal eaten. It does not, or not by much, and we know this from the other end of the chain. When several states put subsidised pulses into ration shops, Suman
Chakrabarti and colleagues measured the effect: a kilo of subsidised pulses lifted consumption by less than two grams per person per day, because households banked the savings and spent them elsewhere. If a direct consumer subsidy barely moves the needle, a production scheme two steps further up the chain moves it less. The protein gap is about what a poor household can afford, not how much dal the country grows—confusing the two, as I argued in What Ails India's Health, is how India keeps paying to supply things people experiencing poverty still cannot buy.
What would actually hold
None of this makes the Mission pointless. The diagnosis behind it is right in every particular. India does import too much; farmers are stuck with the wrong crops; price swings are vicious; and people with low incomes are short of protein. Assured procurement is even the correct tool for one of those problems, the price risk, and the record shows price signals work when the state means them: pulse output rose from 14.7 to 18.3 million tonnes between 2009-10 and 2012-13 on the back of the late-UPA support-price increases, and procurement of pulses at MSP has risen many times over since. The state has done this. What it has not done is mean it consistently for pulses, fund it at the scale its own promise implies, and stop undercutting it through the customs house the moment a price rises.
A serious version would look duller and work better. The import duty would be set before the sowing season and held through the harvest, so a farmer plants against a price he can trust rather than one the Commerce Ministry revises in November; reconciling the duty with the support price is a coordination job for the agriculture, commerce and consumer-affairs ministries, which is precisely what the Court asked them to do. The procurement promise would either be funded at the scale it implies, with somewhere for the grain to go, or dropped in favour of paying farmers the cash difference between the market and the support price, which costs less and is harder to renege on in the dark.
Where the state does buy physically, it leans on the cooperative-society channel that Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee showed is prone to local capture, so the registration and payment trail had better be auditable from the first season. Real money, over a horizon longer than any single mission, would go into the breeding that might move yields. And feeding people would be left to the schemes built for it, the ration shop, the nutrition missions and the school meal, rather than smuggled into a scheme for buying crops.
It is a self-reliance mission whose own government keeps circumventing it, and a hundred tonnes of masoor in Bihar is what the first year of guaranteed procurement actually came to.
Varna is a development economist and writes at policygrounds.press.
Further Reading
On the Mission and its design
Cabinet approval and outlay (PIB)
Launch and components (PIB)
Budget implementation status, 2025-26 (Ministry of Finance)
On the Supreme Court case
On procurement and the support-price system
MSP and public procurement (PRS Legislative Research)
The Shanta Kumar committee and the procurement reaches (RAS)
The rise in pulse procurement at MSP (PIB)
On imports and the price-policy bias
India's pulse imports and sources (Good Food Movement)
Krueger, Schiff and Valdés, The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy (World Bank, 1991, synthesis volume)
Ezekiel, "The Cobweb Theorem," Quarterly Journal of Economics (1938, JSTOR)
On diversification and structural transformation
Ramesh Chand and Ashok Gulati on direct incentives (The Tribune)
The reverse structural transformation (policygrounds.press)
On nutrition and affordability
Chakrabarti and others on PDS pulses, American Journal of Agricultural Economics (2018, Oxford Academic)
ICMR-NIN, Dietary Guidelines for Indians (2024, ICMR)
Insurance without a system (policygrounds.press)
On price volatility and local capture
Bellemare, "Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest," American Journal of Agricultural Economics (2015, Oxford Academic)
Timmer, Falcon and Pearson, Food Policy Analysis (World Bank, 1983, full text)
Bardhan and Mookherjee on capture and governance (AEA)
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