COVID-19: TREND ANALYSIS FOR MARKET ARRIVAL OF GREEN GRAM IN INDIA

The unprecedented crisis hovering over the world due to Covid-19 pandemic has structurally impacted every sector of the world economy. This paper attempts to study the impact of ongoing pandemic in the agricultural sector specific to pulses in India. This paper finds that there is a significantly negative impact of Covid-19 on the pulses market. The market arrival of pulses has declined in the recent period while market demand for pulses has increased, therefore, there exists a supply side shortage for pulses in the domestic economy of India. This paper suggests that Government of India (Agriculture Department) urgently needs to deal with this shortage in supply of domestic pulses in "mandis" (agricultural markets). In this paper market arrival for pulses particularly green gram (Moong whole) has been forecasted for the next few months in Indian Agricultural Markets with the forecasting techniques such as Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique for pre and during pandemic period by using the arrival data in agriculture markets of India from Agmarknet. The results of this study using ARIMA models and ANNs have been compared to obtain the final conclusions with higher visibility in forecasting performance, which shows that there will be a sharp decline in market arrival with an average arrival of 494 quintals per day which can be maximized up to 623 quintals per day by stimulating the modal price at maximum possible point. Therefore, the urgent need of upscaling the technical efficiency of the farmers in different agro-climatic zones is needed to meet the domestic demand with domestic supply.