Impact of COVID-19 on wholesale and retail prices of major pulses in India

SARS-COV-2 was traced in India in January, 2020. The pandemic has impacted almost all the sectors including agricultural sector in the country. The present paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 on both wholesale as well as retail prices of major pulses in India. The daily wholesale and retail price data on five major pulses namely Lentil, Moong, Arhar, Urad and Gram are collected for four metro cities in India i.e. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Hyderabad during the period January, 2019 to September, 2020 from Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Government of India. The Government of India declared nationwide lockdown since March, 25, to May, 31, 2020 in different phases in order to restrict the spread of the infection due to COVID-19. It is observed that, in all the markets, price of the pulses has a sharp increase during lockdown e.g. wholesale (retail) price of Arhar in Mumbai market has increased to the tune of 36% (33%) during lockdown in 2020 as compared to the same period in 2019. For Arhar, the wholesale (retail) price increase up to 4% (4.1) in Kolkata. Increase in price is found to be diverse in different pulses and markets. To incorporate the effect of lockdown on price of pulses, time series model namely Autoregressive Integrated Moving average with exogenous variable (ARIMAX) model with error following Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) process has been applied by incorporating lockdown dummy in both mean and variance equation. It is observed that in almost all the markets, lockdown has significant positive impact on price of the pulses whereas in few cases, it has significant impact on price volatility.