Industry
Brace yourself, climate crisis is coming for your sambar
Summary
- Tur, a staple in Indian kitchens, is the second-most consumed legume in the country. But over the past decade, production of tur has fluctuated widely as weather and rainfall turned erratic. Retail prices have now shot up. What’s the way out?
New Delhi: Taiyamma, 35, runs a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Raichur town of Karnataka. The menu is simple: fluffy dumplings made of rice and black gram—locally known as paddu—served at breakfast, sambar-rice for lunch and mirchi bajjis (chilli fritters) as an evening snack. She has been helming this micro-business for five years now, paying for the upkeep of three children and their education. Taiyamma’s husband, a driver in a neighbouring state capital, earns just enough to repay monthly loan instalments on a newly acquired pick-up van.
Lately, running the eatery has not been easy. Basic items like vegetables and pulses have turned expensive. But Taiyamma does not want to hike prices, fearing she may lose customers. She still makes a decent amount every day, about ₹1,400 or so, after paying for rent, the cost of groceries and two helping hands. But serving sambar-rice is bleeding her, she says.
Sambar, a flavourful stew prepared using assorted spices, chunky pieces of vegetables and tur dal (pigeon peas), is a staple in southern Indian cuisine. As tur prices climbed to a steep ₹180 per kg, Taiyamma can ill-afford to serve sambar for lunch. Anyone else would have raised prices or taken it off the menu. But not her.
“Many workers (casual wage earners) depend on my sambar-rice for lunch (served for ₹40 a plate). If I stop, they may just skip lunch. I have figured out a way for now—use the profits from the evening bajjis to cover the costs of sambar," Taiyamma says over the phone. She has reduced the use of tur dal at her home kitchen replacing it with a cheaper pulse (masoor or lentils, available at half the price). But at the eatery, she does not want to cut corners. The reputation of her nascent business is at stake.
For now, Taiyamma has managed to ward off a minor crisis. But when it comes to tur dal and its outsized importance in Indian kitchens, the next few months appear bleak. The past appears like a roller coaster ride. And its future, mired in uncertainty.
Tur is the second most consumed legume in India after gram (chickpeas) and a staple in kitchens across the country. Not just sambar and pappu (a popular dish prepared with tomatoes and clarified butter), tur dal is also key to dal tadka, a ubiquitous dish from north India.
Crop of neglect
For consecutive years in 2022 and 2023, tur production was hit by wayward rains in major growing regions. While Karnataka suffered a crippling drought, excess rains (in different growth stages) damaged the crop in Maharashtra. This came on top of steadily declining acreage (over the past several decades) in states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh where farmers moved away from tur and towards more remunerative crops like rice, soybean and cotton.
Following the production losses, retail tur prices rose by a staggering 60% between July 2022 and July 2024. Over the past decade, the production of tur fluctuated widely as weather and rainfall turned erratic; prolonged dry spells were interspersed with intense and untimely rains. In comparison, crops like rice, wheat and chickpeas appear steadier, though not immune to climate risks.
Tur is mostly grown by small and marginal farmers, often without any assured irrigation. Data from the agriculture ministry shows that less than a tenth of the area is irrigated. Its woes are accentuated by another factor: the many months it takes to harvest the crop. Most crops grown in the Kharif (summer) season are planted in June-July and harvested by end-October. But tur takes longer, between 150-240 days to mature, depending on the variety planted. Because it stays on the field for five to eight months, the crop is exposed to more weather risks.
If this wasn’t enough of a worry, the average yield of tur is much lower when compared to cereals and pulses like gram. For instance, in the decades between 1950-60 and 2010-20, the productivity of tur rose from 743kg per hectare to 775kg or a mere 32kg increase in 70 years! In comparison, chickpea yields rose by 401kg, and rice yields by an impressive 1,643kg.
The introduction of new technologies (green revolution), research varieties, access to irrigation and assured prices changed the fortunes of crops like rice and wheat. But this revolution escaped pulses like tur.
In a brief conversation over the phone, Gajanan Amdabadkar, a tur grower from Washim district in Maharashtra, referred multiple times to ‘global warming’ and its impact on agriculture. He is also irked by inadequate state support to domestic growers. “In good harvest years, farmers suffer because prices crash. When production is lower due to weather and pest attacks, there is no relief. India is importing poor quality tur from Africa but what are we doing to encourage and protect our own farmers?" he asks.
Chamarasa Patil, a grower and farm union leader from Raichur, Karnataka, says farmers are switching to crops like jowar (sorghum), cotton and sunflower because long-duration tur varieties are not economically viable.
So, it’s a no-brainer why farmers are reluctant to grow tur. The legume is prone to weather risks, it takes a long time to harvest and yields less. The fall out? The tur dal in your sambar may have been grown in distant East Africa or closer home in Myanmar. Worse, it may not even be tur but a cheaper replacement—yellow lentils grown in Canada.
Surging imports
In 2023-24, Indian farmers harvested an estimated 24.5 million tonnes (mt) of pulses. The bulk of it came from the winter harvest of gram (11.6mt or 47% share in production). Winter crops are exposed to fewer weather risks compared to rain-fed Kharif crops like tur.
At 3.4mt, tur ranks second in the pulses pool. But 2023-24 was the second consecutive year of a crippled harvest—a 19% drop compared to the average production between 2016-17 and 2021-22 (4.2mt). As a result, in the past two years, India ended up importing 1.7mt of pigeon peas, most of it from Mozambique and Myanmar.
An analysis of trade data shows that dependence on tur imports (as a share of annual domestic consumption) shot up from 9% in 2020-21 to 21% in 2022-23. This rising dependence is a consequence of both increasing climate risks as well as India’s inability to offer farmers a suitable shorter duration and climate-resilient variety.
In the ongoing Kharif season, the area under tur is higher compared to last year and the crop is healthy so far. But the story does not end here since harvest is a long time away, says Satish Upadhyay, a Mumbai-based importer, and secretary of India Pulses and Grains Association, a trade lobby. Excess rains during flowering in September and pest attacks may lead to a lower harvest.
Because the new crop is four-six months away, India may end up importing 9-9.5 lakh tonnes of tur in 2024-25, Upadhyay adds. That would be a record—the previous high was 8.9 lakh tonnes in 2022-23. In addition, India could also import about 200,000 tonnes ofpeela masoor (yellow lentils), an inferior substitute for tur, from the US and Canada.
Recently, unscrupulous traders from Mozambique exploited India’s growing dependence on imported tur by demanding ransoms for containers leaving the port. But in the long-term, India faces a much bigger threat—it risks pulses going the oilseeds way.
Over half of the edible oils consumed in India are now sourced via imports, most of it is cheap palm oil from south-east Asia. In the 12 months to November 2023, India spent a staggering $17 billion to pay for edible oil imports. In comparison, the pulses import bill was lower but still at a seven-year high of $3.7 billion in 2023-24.
To be sure, the government took several steps to bridge the supply gap in tur and other pulses. These include raising minimum support prices (MSP) to encourage domestic growers, creating a buffer stock to tame local prices during shortages, and supplyagreementswith Mozambique, Malawi and Myanmar for tur and urad (black gram).
But as the recent crisis shows, depending on duty-free imports is a double-edged sword. It can tame retail prices for a while, but as farmers move away from pulses (both due to production risks and influx of cheaper imports), dependence on imports can increase manifold in the future.
While it is easier to meet domestic edible oil via imports due to a large global market with ample supplies (palm, soybean, and sunflower oils), pulses are a different ball game. India is the largest producer and consumer of pulses in the world. So, higher demand from India usually leads to a spike in global prices.
Countries like Mozambique, Canada and Australia grow pulses primarily to export to India. The supply chain is not reliable, and at times when India is particularly vulnerable, it risks being exploited by petty traders in distant shores—as seen recently in Mozambique.
Indian diets are peculiar. A certain variety of legume in short supply is not easily substituted by another. For instance, sambar has to be made only with tur, the besan (chickpea flour) used to make fritters comes from gram, while the famous dal makhani is prepared using urad dal (black gram). One variety of edible oil is more easily replaced by another, but that's not the case with dals.
Unlike in oilseeds, India cannot import its way out of the pulse crisis.
Hope floats
Pulses are a low-cost source of plant protein for a vast majority of Indians. Lower availability and high prices can impact nutritional security. Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, total production of pulses increased from 17.1mt to 27mt (largely due to higher production of chickpeas). But clearly, demand outpaced supplies.
Government data shows that the annual per capita availability of pulses fell from 25.7kg in 1956 to 19.6kg in 2022. During this period, cereal availability rose from 132kg to 168kg.
“We are dal-chawal and dal-roti eaters," says Jeet Singh Sandhu, former deputy director general at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the apex farm research body. “Production of pulses has stagnated for want of a technical breakthrough. Research projects were taken up but there is no continuity. We need a targeted programme and nationwide efforts to bring the crop back to the farm."
In 2016, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Pusa, Delhi, showcased a new shorter duration and high-yielding pigeon-pea variety which promised to end India’sdalwoes. Arun Jaitley, then finance minister, visited Pusa to see this wonder variety and congratulated scientists. The agriculture ministry saidthat the new ‘Pusa Arhar-16’ would reach farmers’ fields by next year. It never did. The variety disappeared into thin air.
What happened?
According to Aditya Pratap, who heads the All India Coordinated Research Project (AICRP) on Kharif pulses (at the Indian Institute of Pulses Research, Kanpur), Pusa-Arhar 16 was discontinued because it was a ‘determinate’ variety—flowering in a single flush in its lifespan—and therefore, more susceptible to pests. A pest attack during a single episode of flowering could wipe outanentire season's harvest.
Tur plants are usually ‘indeterminate’, meaning they keep growing and flowering, and left to themselves, can turn into perennial trees. “We have forced it to be an annual crop which affected its physiology. The crop is also highly sensitive to fluctuations in temperature, sunlight, and moisture. So production often fluctuates with adverse weather," Pratap explains.
There’s more. The crop is susceptible to a notorious pest named ‘maruca’, a pod borer. Because it is difficult to manually spray pesticides on tur plants which grow up to six feet tall, the pest often decimates the crop. But Pratap is hopeful that science and ongoing research on hybrid varieties will be able to find a solution.
The future of sambar rests on that hope.
