The demand for pulses is increasing steeply in the recent past. Pigeonpea is an important pulse crop after chickpeas in terms of production and consumption. The prices of pulses including redgram were highly volatile compared other food grains. Farmers are incurring huge losses due to uncertain prices, hence there was a need for accurate price forecasting to educate farmers. Considering these points the present study has been undertaken with an objective to forecast the future prices of the pigeon pea to help the farmers to take appropriate acreage, selling and storage decisions. The present study aimed to forecast the pigeon pea prices by using the time series data of monthly average prices for the period of January 2006 to December 2016 to predict harvest prices during 2017–18 in major pigeon pea producing states Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujrat. The study used ARIMA models for price forecast. To test the reliability of model MAPE, AIC, and BIC Criterion were used. The model was validated for the year 2016–17. Model parameters were estimated using the R programming software. The forecast shows that market prices of pigeon pea, would be ruling in the range of Rs. 4, 300-7, 600 per quintal during November to January, 2017–18.
ACF, ARIMA, Box and Jenkins, Forecasting, PACF
