India’s Chickpea Yield Is Half That of Other Non-GM Nations

India is the largest grower of pulses in the world and its biggest importer, a combination that has long puzzled its own policymakers. The productivity numbers explain why. On chickpea, India’s most important pulse and one where it leads global production, its 2024 yield of about 1,151 kg per hectare trails Australia’s 2,183 and Ethiopia’s 2,141 by close to half, and sits just below the world average of 1,195. On lentil, India’s 1,028 kg per hectare is behind Turkiye, Canada, Ethiopia, Australia and the United States.

The detail that sharpens the point is the one the minister chose to make: none of these higher-yielding countries grow genetically modified pulses. There are no commercial GM chickpeas, lentils or dry peas anywhere in the world; the genetic-modification traits in wide use sit in soya bean, maize, cotton and canola, not in food pulses. So the countries out-yielding India are doing it with conventional, non-GM varieties. The gap, on this evidence, is not a gap in genetic technology but in agronomy: irrigation, quality seed of improved varieties, soil and pest management, and mechanised, well-resourced farming.

India’s own conditions point to the same conclusion. The minister noted that wherever irrigation arrives, farmers move from pulses to paddy and wheat, leaving pulses on rain-fed, marginal land. Agricultural Statistics at a Glance records India’s total pulse yield at 926 kg per hectare in 2024-25, up over the decade but still below the world average. The FAOSTAT series adds a further caution: between 2023 and 2024 India’s total pulse yield fell about 2.9 per cent, even as the world average rose 1.8 per cent, Canada’s yield climbed 9.6 per cent and Australia’s production jumped nearly 34 per cent. India is not only behind, it lost ground in the latest year.

What next follows directly from the diagnosis. The minister asked scientists to focus research on raising pulse and oilseed productivity and to make India self-sufficient in both, rather than continuing to import dal. On the figures, closing even part of the chickpea gap with Australia or Ethiopia, both non-GM, would do more for India’s pulse self-sufficiency than any single new seed technology. The challenge he set is, in his own framing, less about what seed India plants than about how well it grows it.