Arhar dal now costs Rs 180 a kg, and masoor too, is around Rs 120.
The humble dal is now food for the rich. In Chennai, chicken is cheaper. In Hyderabad, people are opting for eggs. And in Bihar, the poor are surviving on rice and chutney and say they don't know why the price of dal is not an election issue.
Dal is now Rs 180 a kg - costing as much as a kg of chicken in Delhi. In Chennai, chicken is available at Rs 130, cheaper by at least Rs 50. In Hyderabad it is even less -- Rs 120 a kg.
"When dal sold at Rs 140, we gave a plate of dal-chawal for Rs 40. Now that it is Rs 180, we charge Rs 50," said Sri Gayatri, who owns a roadside eatery near the hitech city area of Hyderabad. "People prefer to eat chicken, since it is only Rs 20 more for a plate. We are cooking more chicken and less dal."
"Eggs costs Rs 4 apiece. So even if there are three persons in the family, it will cost only Rs 15," said a local, Balakrishna.
The price of pulses has shot up after this year's crop damage due to unseasonal rains in March. And some say the prices can go further up.
"Maharasthra is the biggest producer of Arhar, and you have a crop damage there... I expect Tuar hitting double century soon," said Ashok Gulati, an agricultural economist in Hyderabad.
In Banka - one of Bihar's poorest districts-- 55-year-old Sudama Manjhi's family of five eats rice and chutney twice a day. Dal has been off menu for a month. It is an impossible expense for people who earn around Rs 100 a day.
A few kilometres away, 48-year-old widow Geeta Devi said the last time she mustered courage to buy pulses was three weeks ago. Now rice and vegetable once a day is all her family can afford.
Sudama Manjhi and his wife Gunja Devi are maha Dalits - the caste to which former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi belongs and one that is wooed by all sides in the ongoing assembly elections.
But no one seems to care that they don't have enough to eat - dal prices have not made it to the election campaign menu.
Asked why it is not an election issue, Geeta Devi had a cynical retort: "Why ask me? I am uneducated. I guess poor people like me have no standing to be even allowed to eat."