The ban has been extended keeping in view the shortage of pulses and price situation in the country.

Unfortunately at present there is no precise assessment for requirement of pulses in the country. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has recommended the consumption level of pulses at the rate of 53 gram per capita per day. With this assessment, the demand for pulses at the end of the 9th Plan in 2001-02 would be around 19 million tonne at a population level of 1025 million.

Comparatively the Planning Commission while estimating has taken into consideration both the normative and behaviourists approaches separately. The normative approach has taken into account the nutritional requirement of pulses at 14.60 kg per consumption unit per year for1996-97. Thus the required production in 1996-97 including seed seed, feed and wastage was estimated at 15.30 million tonne. Similarly following this approach the consumption requirement for the year 2001-02, has been estimated at 15.30 million tonne and production target has been fixed at 17.20 million tonne.

Following the behavioristic approach, the consumption requirement for 1996-97 has been estimated at 13 million tonne and that for the year 2001-02 has been estimated at 16.50 million tonne. Accordingly the production target was fixed at 15.50 million tonne for 1996-97 and 19.50 million tonne for 2001-02 at GDP growth rate of 7 per cent.

In this context, the Centre has estimated that the present demand-supply gap which is at present 2 million tonne per annum. Though, the government placed import of pulses under open general licence (OGL) at a nominal duty of 5 per cent, the import does not seem to be a viable solution to the problem as the major constraint is the scare availability of pulses in theglobal market. This has resulted in imported pulses being costlier than the indigenous pulses which has also affected the open market prices of all pulses in general. Major imports are made from Myanmar, Turkey, China and Australia.

Even though the government announces every year minimum support prices (MSP) for four pulses like gram, pegion pea (arhar), black gram and green gram, the open market prices have ruled much higher except in case of gram in 1994-95 and 1995-96 when its open market prices were just marginally above the MSP due to its production touching the level of 60 lakh tonne.