It Is'nt Working

THE GOVERNMENT’S CROP INSURANCE SCHEME IS A LAUDABLE EFFORT IN THEORY. BUT OUR ONGROUND INVESTIGATIONS SHOW THAT THERE IS MUCH THAT IS WRONG AND UNFAIR.

- Arihant Pawariya

WHEN THE NARENDRA Modi government took charge, the gods welcomed (or rather cursed) it with two back to back drought years (2014, 2015), a first in three decades. Obviously, agriculture growth and productivity plummeted. Then the unseasonal rains lashed out at the already battered farmers. The Centre as well as the state governments loosened pockets to compensate them for their damaged crops destroyed either by rains or by lack of it. The governments followed the usual ritual of announcing the compensation package followed by surveying the fields and then sending them monies through cheques.

These two years also exposed the failure of the government’s then ongoing crop insurance schemes like the National Agriculture Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and Modified NAIS (MNAIS). Also, the government somewhere felt the need to shift from the culture of compensation packages to a system of crop insurance.

In a country where even well off and educated folks don’t take their insurance seriously, making poor farmers accept crop insurance was going to be an uphill task. The government merged earlier insurance policies and tweaked them to make them more lucrative, including reducing the premiums considerably.

Kharif 2015 was the first season when the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the new crop insurance scheme, was put to test. Consider the achievement of the scheme from the impressive numbers put out by the government in a press release on 7 December 2016. Compared to kharif 2015, PMFBY insured 40 per cent more farmers in