Crop Insurance Schemes To Help Farmers

According to the Economic Survey 2018, long-term weather patterns indicate that climate change could reduce annual agricultural incomes in the range of 15% to 18% on average and up to 20% to 25% for unirrigated areas in India.

- Varsha Singh

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley proposed to hike the farm credit target by ₹1 lakh crore to a record ₹11 lakh crore in the Budget 2018-19 to improve credit flow in the agricultural sector. In 2017-18, the government had kept a credit target of ₹10 lakh crore.

The present Budget also suggests a suitable mechanism to enable access of lessee cultivators to credit without compromising the rights of land owners. Announcing a major step to help small and marginal farmers in the fisheries and the animal husbandry sector, Jaitley extended the facility of Kisan Credit Cards (KCC) to the sectors.

Despite such advances, the government needs to focus more on existing relief and compensation mechanisms to deal with crop losses in India. Several studies have shown that existing the relief and compensation mechanism for farmers against crop loss is chaotic, politicised, and has failed to bring timely and adequate help to the affected farmers. The expectations from the recently launched flagship crop insurance scheme are therefore quite high.

Crop insurance schemes are considered a failure in India due to adverse selection risks and the problem of execution. India has two main crop insurance schemes, namely, the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) and the Revised Weather-Based Insurance Coverage Scheme (RWBICS).