Next up: 'Urad, toor, moong dal' from Tata

The Tata group, India’s leading diversified conglomerate that’s into businesses such as producing salt, watches, steel, automobiles and software on Tuesday announced its foray into pulses, a key staple and the richest source of protein for the mostly-vegetarian Indian.

Tata Chemicals, a group company with interests in soda ash, salt and fertilisers, will be the channel through which four variants of dals or lentils - moong, chana, toor and urad — will be retailed countrywide.

The firm will extend its ‘i-Shakti’ brand from salt to branded pulses as a part of this effort.

The group will leverage the strengths of Tata Chemicals and Rallis India to rope in a large section of farmers across India.

Tata Chemicals will use its reach in north and east, while subsidiary Rallis will work on its strength in south and west and help farmers improve yields etc.
The company aims to reach the pulses to at least 6 crore households over the next couple of years.

It is expecting to get around 6.3 lakh acres of land under pulse cultivation and aims to involve almost 2.3 lakh farmers in the next five years in the project.
“We don’t buy the crop at discounts. The prices we pay to the farmers are very competitive and much higher than minimum support prices. And today, farmers swell with pride when they say they cultivate and sell it to Tatas,” said V Shankar, MD & CEO of Rallis.

While demand for pulses in India exceeds 18 million tonne annually, supplies are at 15 million tonne. The shortfall is met through imports, mainly from Canada and Myanmar.

A major reason for the shortfall in pulses is the low yield in India at just 622 kg per hectare, compared with 965 kg in Sri Lanka and 807 kg in Bangladesh.
Egypt boasts of the highest yield in the world at 3,058 kg per hectare.

“Dal has been an integral part of almost every Indian meal. This is an initiative that is holistic in nature and takes due care in every process — from seed to food, therefore the term ‘from farm to fork’,” said R Gopalakrishnan, chairman, Rallis India Ltd and vice-chairman, Tata Chemicals Ltd, and one of the key persons in the group behind this initiative.

The pulses will be priced between Rs95 and Rs100 per kg.  

The i Shakti range of pulses will be rolled out in a phased manner and will be initially available for buying on the shelf only in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and later in the rest of the country.

A national rollout will take effect from the next fiscal.

Gopalakrishnan said the price of branded pulses are almost on a par with the unbranded loose variety available at kirana stores.

“As India has only 4-5% of branded pulses in the market, this created a high dependency on imports, steeply pushing up prices. Our target is to produce 0.5 million tonnes of pulses in the next 5 years. We expect our business to grow at 5-6%, but we still need to accelerate,” said R Mukundan, managing director of Tata Chemicals.

The company has launched ‘Grow More Pulses’, a private-public partnership initiative between Punjab (for moong) and Tamil Nadu (for urad) so that the farming community in these states is induced into cultivating pulses.

Tata Chemicals has already got an approval from Maharashtra for a similar exercise, and is awaiting it from Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.