Chickpea (Chana) Farming in India: Varieties, Sowing, Diseases, Pests, Yield, Cost per Acre and Profit

Chana (chickpea, gram) is India's largest pulse. It is a cool-season rabi crop, sown from about mid-October to mid-November (earlier where it is rainfed), at roughly 75 to 80 kg seed per hectare for desi types, which is about 30 kg per acre. Treat the seed, give a phosphorus-led basal dose, irrigate once or twice at most, and watch for wilt in the early weeks and pod borer from flowering. The national average yield in the ICAR-IIPR report is 1,192 kg per hectare (2020-21), about 4.8 quintal per acre, while good package demonstrations gave about 1,611 kg per hectare, about 6.5 quintal per acre. At the 2027-28 MSP of Rs 5,958 per quintal that is about Rs 29,000 to Rs 39,000 gross per acre. Profit depends on your cost: at the all-India cost of production of Rs 3,751 per quintal, each quintal leaves about Rs 2,200. Check the live mandi price before you sell.

Chana is the crop most Indian farmers mean when they say dal ki kheti in winter. It is also called gram, Bengal gram or chickpea (Cicer arietinum), and it is sown after the rains on the moisture the soil is still holding. According to the ICAR-IIPR chickpea coordinator report 2021-22, India grew chana on 9.99 million hectares in 2020-21 and harvested 11.91 million tonnes, which works out to 1,192 kg per hectare. Production then rose to 13.98 million tonnes in 2021-22 (a third advance estimate), against 7.33 million tonnes in 2014-15. That is a jump of about 91 percent in eight years, and the report credits better seed, wilt-resistant varieties and policy support.

The crop sits in a handful of states. The table below comes from the state-wise tables in the same report (2020-21, originally Directorate of Economics and Statistics data). The share column is our own sum against the 11.91 million tonne national figure. These are 2020-21 numbers, so ask your agriculture department for the latest year before you quote them anywhere.

Read the yield column, not just the area. Maharashtra and Rajasthan grow as much chana as Madhya Pradesh but harvest fewer kilos from each hectare, and Karnataka sits far lower still at 625 kg. Much of that gap is water, variety and disease. A farmer in Madhya Pradesh who gets 1,488 kg per hectare is not luckier than you. He is mostly sowing a better-matched variety on time and keeping wilt out of the field. The rest of this guide is about closing that gap on your own plot.

Chana likes a cool, dry winter and a well-drained field. It lives on stored soil moisture, so the first thing to check is not the soil type but whether the field will drain after rain and hold some water at sowing. Heavy irrigation, standing water and warm, humid spells at flowering all work against it. You can grow it on a wide range of soils, but a waterlogged corner will give you dead plants and a patch you will blame on the seed.

• Residual moisture does most of the work. The ICAR-IIPR report says chana is mostly grown on residual soil moisture, and that too few irrigations or rains during the season is a major yield limit.
• Rice fallow can work well. In the report's front-line demonstrations on rice fallow, the improved package gave 1,319 kg per hectare against 1,014 kg with local practice, about 30 percent more.
• Hot soil at sowing is a risk. TNAU lists avoiding sowing in high temperature, and protecting young seedlings from heat, as steps against wilt and dry root rot. A field sown too early into warm soil is the one that shows dead seedlings a month later.
• Acidic, wet soil at sowing is a known trouble spot. The IIPR report names acidic soil, excess moisture at sowing, poor germination and collar rot as constraints in some eastern areas.
• Field practice, not a sourced number: do not sow into a field that stays wet. Cut a drain, or choose a higher plot. We are not giving a pH or temperature range because we did not find one on an official page we could open.

If you have no assured irrigation or no buyer lined up, grow desi. It is the hardy one, small and dark, and it turns into chana dal and besan, which every mandi buys. Kabuli is the big beige chana that sells as chhole and fetches a better rate per kilo, but it needs more seed, more water, more care, and a buyer who wants it. Many farmers chase the kabuli price and then lose the difference to weak germination, wilt and a smaller yield.

In words: kabuli costs you more seed per acre and takes longer in some zones, so its higher price has to beat a higher cost and a more uncertain yield. Work out the numbers with your own rates before you switch. One milling study we saw in summary reported kabuli yields of 944 to 1,764 kg per hectare against 811 to 2,558 kg for desi across 46 popular varieties. That is a research summary, not a recommendation, but it tells you the variety you pick matters more than the type.

Pick a variety released for your zone, and if wilt has ever hit your field, pick one bred for wilt resistance. Then buy certified seed of it, early, because the good varieties sell out. The ICAR-IIPR report lists recent releases by zone. Ask your KVK or state seed corporation which of them is in stock this season, since a release on paper is not the same as seed in the shop.

How to use the table. Find your zone first, then your water: rainfed, irrigated and timely sown, or late sown. A farmer in the central zone with irrigation and a wilt history should look hard at Samriddhi or Pusa Chickpea 20211. A farmer in the north west plain on rainfed land should look at the drought-tolerant lines such as Pusa Chickpea 4005 and IPC L 4-14. In the south zone, Nandyal Gram 857 is the fastest at 95 to 100 days. The shorter the duration, the less time pod borer and a dry spell have to catch the crop.

Wilt-resistant lines were bred by bringing resistance in from lines such as WR 315 and Vijay, which is why newer releases are worth the effort in a field with a wilt history. In the Madhya Pradesh demonstrations published by Singh (2016) in the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences, growers used the wilt-resistant JG 130, JG 11, JG 16 and JG 14, and JG 11 gave the best yield at the 18 to 22 October sowing in 2008-09. The CGIAR note on Pusa Chickpea 20211 says it was built on the Pusa 391 base with the wilt resistance of WR 315. Under wilt stress it gave a weighted mean of 2,392 kg per hectare against 1,877 kg for Pusa 391. These are trial averages. Your field can come in higher or lower depending on water, sowing date and disease.

For most of India, sow between mid-October and mid-November. On rainfed land that depends on stored moisture, go earlier: the second half of October in the north and the first half of October in central and south India. Irrigated chana in the north is usually sown a little later, in the first half of November. Avoid sowing into hot soil in early October if you can, and avoid December, because late sowing shortens the crop and brings it into flowering at the wrong time.

The trade-off is simple. Sow too early, in warm soil, and you invite wilt and root rot. Sow too late, and the crop runs short of cool days and meets more heat at pod filling. The TNAU IPM page adds a pest reason for the early end of the window: planting in mid-October helps the crop dodge the peak of gram pod borer. Whatever date you choose, try to sow the same variety on the same days as your neighbours. When a whole block flowers together, pod borer has no single late field to build up in.

For desi chana plan on about 30 to 32 kg of seed per acre, which is 75 to 80 kg per hectare, with rows 30 cm apart and about 10 cm between plants. Kabuli needs about 40 to 45 kg per acre (100 to 110 kg per hectare) in rows 45 cm apart. Seed size changes the weight. Bold seed means more kilos for the same number of plants, so always check the 100-seed weight on the bag.

These numbers come from a chain of sources, so treat them as a guide and not a label. A 2024 AICRP rabi pulses report (seen only in summary) lists 75 to 80 kg per hectare for desi and 100 to 110 kg for kabuli, at 30 by 10 cm and 45 by 10 cm spacing. An ICAR-journal trial on desi chana found 75 kg per hectare at 30 cm row spacing gave the top yield (23.26 quintal per hectare) among 60, 75 and 90 kg and among 20, 30 and 40 cm rows. A second ICAR trial found a larger-seeded desi variety did best at 50 kg per hectare, while a smaller-seeded one was fine at 40 kg.

Do a germination test a few days before sowing. Put 100 seeds in a damp cloth and count how many sprout. If fewer than 90 do, add a little to the seed rate instead of sowing thin and hoping. Use a seed drill if you can. It places seed at an even depth in moist soil, and later weeding, spraying and harvest are much easier than in a broadcast field. If you think in bighas, remember that a bigha is a different size in each state, so work out your per-acre seed first and then scale it by your local bigha.

Treat every kilo of seed before it goes in the ground. A cheap seed treatment is the best insurance against wilt and root rot. TNAU lists Trichoderma viride at 4 g per kg, Pseudomonas fluorescens at 10 g per kg, or carbendazim or thiram at 2 g per kg of seed. Do the fungicide or bio-agent first, then Rhizobium and PSB, in shade, and let the seed dry before sowing.

In plain numbers, one acre of desi chana takes about 30 kg of seed. At 4 g per kg that is 120 g of Trichoderma. At 20 g per kg it is 600 g each of Rhizobium and PSB (our arithmetic). Check on each pack whether a chemical fungicide and a bio-agent may go on the same seed, because a fungicide can kill the living product. The full recipe and the order of steps are in our chana seed treatment guide, and the bio-inoculants are explained in the biofertilizer for chana guide.

If you want a Trichoderma product for the seed or the soil, Katyayani sells Trichoderma viride bio-fungicide powder. Its page describes a 1.5 percent wettable powder for wilt, rot, blight and damping-off in general. It does not name chickpea and shows no dose, so use the dose on the pack label or the 4 g per kg that TNAU lists for chickpea seed.

Chana makes much of its own nitrogen with the help of Rhizobium, so it wants only a small starter dose of nitrogen but a good dose of phosphorus. One Madhya Pradesh demonstration package used 20:60:40 kg of N, P2O5 and K2O per hectare, which is about 8:24:16 kg per acre. TNAU lists 15 to 20 kg of nitrogen, 40 kg of P2O5 and 20 kg of sulphur per hectare with FYM. Let a soil test set your final dose, not a neighbour or a bag label.

• Test the soil first. Phosphorus, sulphur and zinc are the usual gaps. Our guide to reading a soil health card shows how to turn the report into a dose.
• Put fertiliser in at sowing, in the furrow beside or below the seed. Fertiliser thrown on the surface after the crop is up reaches the roots late.
• Go easy on nitrogen. TNAU keeps warning against too much leafy growth because it brings blight and grey mould.
• Rainfed fields: the IIPR report found a hydrogel at 5 kg per hectare gave the best grain yield under rain-fed conditions, and 2.5 kg per hectare was at par at Nandyal. Whether it pays on your land is a local call.
• Foliar spray: the TNAU crop page lists a 2 percent urea or DAP spray at flowering (about 70 days after sowing) and again 10 days later. We could not confirm this on the IIPR report, so treat it as optional.

If you would rather buy the soil inputs as a set, the Chana Unnati Soil Kit page says it is for chickpea and lists Trichoderma viride (1 to 2 kg per acre), Bhumiraja VAM mycorrhizae (4 to 8 kg per acre), Vasistha (thiamethoxam 1 percent plus chlorantraniliprole 0.5 percent, 2.5 kg per acre, for aphids, stem borers and leafhoppers) and a 200 g mix micronutrient pack of zinc, iron and boron. The page does not say Vasistha is for gram pod borer, so do not buy it for that. For the mycorrhiza and Trichoderma side the logic is the same as in our biofertiliser guide: they work on the root zone, not as a replacement for a basal dose.

Fewer than you think. Many chana fields make a crop on stored moisture alone. If you have water, one irrigation at pod initiation is the TNAU recommendation, and a pre-sowing irrigation helps seed germinate. One irrigation or two is a trade-off. A second light watering helps in a very dry winter on light soil, but every extra watering pushes soft leafy growth and raises the risk of grey mould and blight.

• Water at pod initiation (TNAU). This is when water has the biggest effect on seed filling.
• Skip irrigation in cool, humid, foggy spells unless the field is truly dry. TNAU lists avoiding too much irrigation as a step against Alternaria blight and Botrytis grey mould.
• Do not water a wilt patch to save it. Water does not cure wilt. See the disease section.
• Save stored moisture. Keep weeds down in the first weeks, because they drink the same water as the crop.
• We found no official page that fixes the number of irrigations for every zone, so follow your state university advice for your district.

If you irrigate by drip, the Chana Unnati Drip Kit page says it is for chickpea and gives rates in millilitres per litre of water, not per acre: Trichoderma viride 2 to 3 ml per litre every 15 days, K-Raja mycorrhiza 5 g per litre at flowering and seed setting, Metarhizium 2 to 3 ml per litre every 15 to 20 days, and seaweed extract 2 ml per litre every 20 days. Since chana is mostly a no-irrigation or one-irrigation crop, a drip kit only makes sense if you already run drip on the plot.

The first month decides the weed fight. Chana grows slowly while it is small, and weeds race ahead and steal water and light. The TNAU recommendation is pendimethalin as a pre-emergence herbicide, 1.0 to 1.25 kg active ingredient per hectare, followed by one hand weeding if needed. Keep the field clean for the first 6 to 8 weeks, with inter-cultivation or band weeding, and you will have done most of the job.

Do not copy a trial dose off a table into your sprayer. The IIPR report itself warns that chana is very sensitive to herbicides at different growth stages, which is why a safe post-emergence herbicide is a breeding goal. Read the label, confirm that chickpea is listed, and calibrate the sprayer. To turn an active-ingredient dose into product, divide it by the percent strength printed on the pack.

Walk into the field and look at where the damage is and how old the crop is. A patch of seedlings that collapsed and lie flat at 3 to 5 weeks, with a dark colour inside the stem when you split it, is Fusarium wilt. Scattered plants that dry up between flowering and podding, with brittle, dry roots, is dry root rot. Dark spots on leaves, stems and pods after cool, wet weather is Ascochyta blight. Poor pod setting and a grey spore mass on flowers is Botrytis grey mould.

Wilt is the one that costs the most. Our chana wilt disease guide covers early versus late wilt and how to tell it from dry root rot, so we keep it short here. The ICAR-IIPR report names Fusarium wilt and gram pod borer as the main problems, says dry root rot is rising in central and south India, and notes that no stable source of dry root rot resistance has been found in cultivated chickpea. That means seed treatment, sowing date and rotation do the heavy lifting.

For root rot and wilt in the root zone, Katyayani has a collection of fungicide for chickpea root rot. It is a chickpea-specific collection by its title, and it currently shows three products (Meta-Manco metalaxyl plus mancozeb, Boost propiconazole, and All In One organic fungicide). The listings do not name chickpea, so check each product label before you buy. For the leaf blights, there is a collection of fungicide for chickpea Alternaria blight with Tebusul (tebuconazole plus sulphur), Samartha (carbendazim plus mancozeb) and Striker (Pseudomonas fluorescens). Again, the listings do not name chickpea, so read the label for crop and dose.

Dose Check: The spray doses above are TNAU research recommendations, and TNAU itself gives different mancozeb rates on different pages (2.5 g and 3 g per litre). We did not check the CIB&RC chickpea label rows. Before you buy or spray, confirm on the pack that chickpea and the disease are listed, and follow the label dose and waiting period.

What to do if you see wilt or patchy drying

1. Pull one plant and cut the root and lower stem. A dark inside to the stem points to wilt. Brittle dry roots with no dark stem point to dry root rot.
2. Note the age of the crop. Seedlings at 3 to 5 weeks lean toward wilt. Flowering to podding leans toward dry root rot.
3. Do not keep adding water or fertiliser to a patch. It cures neither disease and wastes money.
4. Mark the patch and keep its seed out of next year's seed lot. Seed from a diseased patch carries trouble forward.
5. Plan next season now: a wilt-resistant variety, deep summer ploughing, seed treatment, and a long gap before chana comes back on that plot.

Gram pod borer is the main pest, and the hole in the green pod is its signature. Cut open a pod with a neat round hole and you will often find a fat caterpillar and a half-eaten seed. Semilooper, cutworm and termites come next. Scout from the first flowers and spray only when you cross a threshold. TNAU gives the pod borer ETL as 2 early-stage larvae per plant or 5 to 8 eggs per plant. Young larvae scrape leaves down to the veins. Older ones bore into the pod.

The rule that saves money is simple: check, count, then decide. Walk the field in a zigzag, shake or inspect plants, and count early-stage larvae. Below the threshold, traps and neem are enough. Above it, spray a product that lists chickpea and the pest on its label while the larvae are small, and wet the flowers and pods. Our chana pod borer control guide has the early warning signs and IPM steps in detail. TNAU's Bengal gram pest page also lists older organophosphate and other chemical options and doses. We left them out on purpose, because several are restricted or not labelled for chickpea today.

Katyayani's chickpea-specific collections are a place to start looking by problem. For the pod-boring caterpillar, see insecticide for gram pod borer, which shows Finish It organic larvicide, EMA 5 emamectin benzoate, and two Bt products. For leaf-eating semiloopers, see insecticide for chickpea semiloopers (Fluben flubendiamide, Finish It, and two Beauveria bassiana products). For cutworms that cut seedlings at the base, see insecticide for chickpea cutworm (Triple Attack, K-Indox, Docter 505 and a powder form). If patches of stunted, yellow plants show up with no sign of wilt, see insecticides for chickpea nematodes, which lists Paecilomyces, Verticillium chlamydosporium and Pochonia products. All four are chickpea-specific by their titles, but the listings name no crop, so check the label of each product for chickpea, the dose and the waiting period.

For a ready-made set aimed at the root zone, the Chana Unnati Organic Kit page names chickpea and lists Trichoderma viride (soil-borne disease such as damping off, wilt and root rot, 1 to 2 kg per acre), Metarhizium anisopliae (grubs and cutworms, 1 to 2 kg per acre), Bhumiraja mycorrhizae and humic plus fulvic acid. It is built for soil and early-stage problems and does not target pod borer, so use the scouting rule above for that.

A cold snap at flowering or an unseasonal rain can knock flowers off and cut pod set, and a cool, humid spell also welcomes Botrytis grey mould. You cannot stop the weather, so what you can do is make sure the field is covered. If you are enrolled in the crop insurance scheme, report the loss within the time limit. We cover enrolment in the PMFBY rabi registration guide and the cold-damage claim rules in the frost damage claim guide.

We are not quoting a deadline or premium here, because those change each season and the linked guides carry the current ones. When damage happens, take dated photos of the field, keep your sowing and input bills, and call the insurance helpline the same day.

Harvest when the leaves have turned yellow to brown and dropped and the pods are dry and straw coloured. Cut, let the plants dry for a short time in the field, then thresh. The national average was 1,192 kg per hectare in 2020-21, which is about 4.8 quintal per acre. Front-line demonstrations with the full package gave 1,611 kg per hectare, about 6.5 quintal per acre. The gap is what good practice earns you.

Be honest about what the table says. Demonstration yields show what a well-managed field can reach. They are not a promise for your plot. The jump from the national average to the package result comes from the same few things every time: certified seed of a suitable variety, treated seed, timely sowing, a clean first month, and pod borer scouting. None of them is expensive. All of them are skipped on many farms.

There is no single national number. Cost changes with state, year, and what you count. We could not find an official item-wise rupee table for chana, so here are the numbers we could source. In Rajasthan, the Legume Research study puts cash cost (A1) at about Rs 20,040 per hectare and total cost (C3) at about Rs 52,268 per hectare in the triennium ending 2021. That is about Rs 8,100 and Rs 21,200 per acre. These are older costs, so today's will be higher.

The cost words in plain language. A1 is what you actually pay out of pocket. B1 adds interest on your own money. C3 adds the value of your own labour and your own land rent, so it is the cost if you had to pay for everything. In the India study, hired labour and seed were each about 7 to 15 percent of total cost, and about half the labour was done by the family. That is why a farmer who counts only cash feels profit is high, and a farmer who counts everything feels it is thin. Both are right, they are just using different cost measures.

Your own cost sheet: the line items and the quantities that go with them

The quantities below come from the sources named in this guide. The rupee column is for your local rate. We have not filled it in because we have no official rate for it, and prices change by state and season.

Cost per acre is the sum of every row. Cost per quintal is that sum divided by the quintals you harvest. If your cost per quintal comes out below the MSP, you are earning at MSP. If you think in bighas, work out the per-acre sheet first and then scale it by your local bigha, since a bigha is a different size in every state.

Profit per acre is the selling price minus your cost per quintal, multiplied by quintals harvested. At the 2027-28 MSP of Rs 5,958 and the all-India cost of production of Rs 3,751 per quintal, each quintal leaves about Rs 2,207. At the national average yield of about 4.8 quintal per acre that is about Rs 10,650 per acre. At 6.5 quintal per acre it is about Rs 14,400. Full-cost profit is lower, as the last column shows.

All figures here are our arithmetic on sourced inputs. The A2+FL cost leaves out land rent and interest, so it flatters profit. The C2 figure is the 2025-26 projection and the 2027-28 C2 will be higher, so true profit over full cost is likely a little below the last column. Cost per quintal also falls as yield rises, so the higher-yield rows understate profit. Use the table as a range.

• Break-even yield: divide your total cost per acre by the price. With the Rajasthan C3 anchor (about Rs 21,200 per acre) and MSP Rs 5,958, break-even is about 3.6 quintal per acre. With the A1 anchor (about Rs 8,100) it is about 1.4 quintal. These costs are old, so use your own.
• Chana ka bhav (market price): this changes every day and we did not pull a live mandi price. Check the nearest mandi on Agmarknet or with a local commission agent on the day you sell. If the mandi is below MSP, find out whether your state is buying at MSP.
• Price logic: storing chana for a better price only works if you can keep it free of bruchids and your cost of waiting (interest, bags, loss) is below the price gain. Work that out before you hold stock.
• Per bigha: profit per bigha is profit per acre times your bigha in acres. We give no number because a bigha is different in every state and we found no official figure for each.
• Per hectare: multiply the per-acre figure by 2.47.

The Union Cabinet approved the 2027-28 rabi MSP on 30 September 2026. Gram (chana) is Rs 5,958 per quintal, up Rs 83 from Rs 5,875 in 2026-27. The all-India weighted cost of production was put at Rs 3,751 per quintal, so MSP is a 59 percent margin over that cost, in line with the policy of at least 1.5 times cost.

The official release is the PIB note on rabi MSP 2027-28. For all rabi crops side by side, see our rabi MSP crop-wise rates guide. Remember what MSP is. It is the price at which the government offers to buy where it procures. It is not a promise that every mandi pays it, and the quantity bought at MSP in your state may be limited.

Dry the grain well, clean out the dust and broken seed, and store it in clean, sealed bags in a cool, dry place. The main storage pest is the pulse bruchid, a small seed beetle that turns up as tiny round holes in the grain. In an ICAR-IIPR trial on stored chickpea, deltamethrin 2.8 EC at 0.04 ml per kg was best, followed by neem oil at 5 ml per kg and diatomaceous earth at 5 g per kg, with protection measured at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months.

Read that as a trial result and not a label. For grain you plan to sell or eat, use only a product whose label allows treatment of stored food grain, and prefer the gentler options. If you are keeping chana as seed for next year, choose it from healthy plants, never from a wilt patch, and keep it apart from the rest of the stock.

The days after sowing for flowering are a rough guide. Your variety and sowing date shift them, so use the stage of the crop and not the calendar as your trigger.

Most chana losses we hear about come from a short list of avoidable mistakes. Here they are with the fix.

Conclusion

Good chana farming is a chain: the right variety for your zone, sowing in the right window, treated seed, a phosphorus-led basal dose, a clean first month, scouting for wilt and pod borer, and a harvest sold with a price check. The national average of about 4.8 quintal per acre against about 6.5 quintal in demonstrations shows how much sits in good practice, and the 2027-28 MSP of Rs 5,958 per quintal gives the price floor to plan against. Confirm every dose on the product label and your KVK advice before you act.