(Edited by Shailaja Neelakantan)

Triple whammy as dal, tomato and potato prices surge together

NEW DELHI: The cause for consumers' tears this summer is not the price of onions.It's the triple whammy of a huge increase in the cost of tomatoes, potatoes, arhar dal and urad dal - all staple foods. It hasn't helped that the government's efforts to build stocks of dals, has been either absent or ineffective.Arhar dal now costs as much as Rs 170/kg. Urad dal is selling for as high as Rs 196/kg. Tomatoes are going for Rs 100 a kg. And potato prices are up to almost Rs 20/kg.Dal production has been hit due to last year's drought, almost doubling its prices. Higher-than-expected heat has destroyed some tomato crop, which may have constricted its supply, pushing And a blight that swept across potato fields in Bengal, has hit the tuber's supply.The situation is so bad that vegetable price inflation rose 2.21 percent to 12.94%. That then badly hit the Wholesale Price Index, pushing it to 0.79% in May, its highest level in 19 months. And with no change in the already high inflation in the price of dals - at 35.56 percent - food inflation on the whole spiked to 7.88% in May from 4.23% a month earlier.The government's target is to procure 1.5 lakh tonnes of dals - or pulses - for buffer stock creation and so far, 1.15 lakh tonnes have been purchased during the kharif and rabi seasons, food minister Ram Vilas Paswan said. He added that rabi crop procurement is still going on, he added.India imported 5.5 million tonnes of pulses last year. The country's pulses production is estimated to be 17.06 million tonnes in 2015-16 crop year (July-June), while the demand is pegged at 23.5 million tonnes.In the last two years, arhar dal prices have doubled and the cost of urad has increased by around 120%. Even the price of chana dal, which is produced in large quantities and is usually unaffected by inflation, has risen 85% in this period, in Delhi.The case of the two staple vegetables - potatoes and tomatoes - is slightly different. Both are shorter duration crops. But both have seen prices surge.Tomatoes are ripe for harvesting 60-70 days after transplanting while potatoes take 75-120 days to mature. The tomatoes that are coming to the market now were planted around March. While there were some unusually high temperatures in that period, the crop destruction was not staggering.Winter rain in the larger producing states was not unduly distressing, either. In any case, tomato farming isn't completely dependent on rain. So the agriculture ministry's second advanced estimates for horticultural crops pegged the tomato crop for 2015-16 at 18.2 million metric tonne, up from the previous year's 16.4 million metric tonne.And still, tomato prices have gone through the roof. Although the government says that prices are not so high, data published by the department of consumer affairs and the National Horticulture Board show that in most cities, prices have increased by 100-200% between April and June this year. A comparison of prices between June 2014 and June 2016 shows that in most cities, tomato prices have increased phenomenally.The potato economy is different from the tomato one, in that it's not based just on supply and demand. A portion of each year's harvest of potatoes goes into cold storages across the country and comes out for the market later Potato production was estimated to dip this year to about 46 million tonnes from the previous year's 48 million tonnes. The blight in Bengal destroyed some potato crop, pushing its price up.