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Selling kesari dal as food is still prohibited in India under regulation 2.2.1 of the FSSAI prohibition regulations, carried forward unchanged from a 1961 rule. The 2021 amendment did not lift it. It inserted a separate clause tolerating up to 2% of kesari occurring incidentally inside other pulses, which is a contamination limit rather than a permission to sell. FSSAI names arhar dal and besan as the adulteration targets.
Indian food law permits a low GI claim only where the measured value is below 55. ICMR-NIN's own measurement puts wheat chapatti at 65.66, so plain wheat atta does not clear that bar. What the published Indian data shows lowering the number is blending legume flour into the dough, not the wheat variety, and the claim is self-certified with no testing protocol prescribed.
Polishing is a friction step applied to already-split dal with oil, water or cloth, done to raise appearance and the price the mill commands. India has no legal definition of polished or unpolished dal, though no food additive is permitted in dry pulses and mineral oil coating is banned outright. The popular water test detects added dye, not polish, and no home test for polish exists.
Pulse beetles lay their eggs on pods in the field, and the larvae travel home inside seeds that show no external damage at all. The container did not fail. India's own grain standard makes this worse by defining a weevilled grain as one already bored by insects, which excludes an egg-spotted seed, so a pack can pass specification and still hatch beetles on your shelf.
Masoor dal carries the most protein of the common Indian pulses at 24.35 g per 100 g, followed by moong dal at 23.88 g and urad dal at 23.06 g. Split dals always beat their whole forms because dehusking removes a coat that holds almost no protein. The gram figure alone decides less than people expect, because pulse protein is short of methionine and only completes against a cereal.
Khapli is emmer, a hulled tetraploid wheat with 28 chromosomes. Sona Moti is Indian dwarf wheat, a round-grained hexaploid that taxonomists classify as a subspecies of ordinary bread wheat. Measured against bread wheat, emmer runs higher in zinc and magnesium but lower in total dietary fibre, and every one of these wheats contains gluten that remains unsafe for coeliac disease.
