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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Crop insurance and the agrarian crisis in India -Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla and Samir K Barua

Crop insurance and the agrarian crisis in India -Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla and Samir K Barua

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published Published on Jun 22, 2017   modified Modified on Jun 22, 2017
-Livemint.com

Crop insurance has failed to provide much-needed relief to farmers from destitution

With one farmer committing suicide every half-an-hour, the number of farmers who have ended their lives as per official records in India is estimated at over 300,000 over the past two decades. These numbers do not include suicides by agricultural labourers, though they too are victims of the agrarian crisis. As each death affects at least the immediate family of the deceased, the number of persons in severe distress is very large. With over half the country dependent on agriculture for a livelihood, these suicides constitute a colossal agrarian crisis in India.

There are multiple reasons for the crisis: rising costs of inputs, non-availability of key resources such as water for irrigation, volatility in prices of produce, inadequate knowledge of modern methods of farming, changing and inimical policy regimes, and worsening terms of exchange.

The key reason for the crisis, however, lies in a fundamental characteristic of agriculture. It is an economic activity that requires a significant part of the costs to be incurred upfront, without certainty of outcome. The quantum and value of output are affected by factors largely out of the control of farmers, such as weather patterns, global supply-demand determined price situation, and exchange rates. Unlike any other economic activity, farming does not stabilize over time. Even after decades, a farmer is helplessly exposed to the same endemic risks every cycle.

The proximate reason for farmer suicides is inability to pay back the loan taken at the beginning of the cycle if the crop fails. Crop insurance could mitigate the risk faced by farmers. As part of ongoing research, we examined the efficacy of crop insurance schemes propagated by the government over the last four decades. The analysis shows that crop insurance has failed to provide much-needed relief to farmers from destitution. The reasons for failure include: a) reluctance on the part of governments to allocate adequate funds for providing subsidy required to support cost of insurance—exacerbated by the problems that arise when the central and the state governments have to agree on a subsidy-sharing formula; b) delays in payment of compensation—arising from bureaucratic hurdles in assessment of damage and disbursal of compensation; and c) inadequacy of the compensation amount in the case of crop failure.

As a part of our ongoing research, we analysed nation-wide crop insurance data gathered by the National Institute of Securities Markets or NISM (through a survey conducted in 2014) and concluded the following: a) average awareness about crop insurance country was only 38.8%, and b) average usage of crop insurance was merely 6.7%. Awareness and usage varied widely across states. The low awareness, despite four decades of dissemination, indicates inadequate efforts by government to promote crop insurance. The low usage indicates that farmers either do not find crop insurance useful or are denied access to the insurance. Further, as crop insurance is a mandatory requirement for availing of crop loans, farmers are either not aware that their crops are insured, or loans from formal channels are not reaching the farmers. Formal channels have failed to carry out their mandate of providing adequate funding with due insurance cover to farmers.

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Livemint.com, 22 June, 2017, http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/h2uWBKUe2aQNPVEpkZ4u8J/Crop-insurance-and-the-agrarian-crisis-in-India.html


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