INSIGHT 36 Towards Wholistic Crop Insurance Alok Sinha © Dinodia
Indian agriculture has suffered for far too long from having been tackled in bits and pieces. The wholistic approach (by way of farmers’ income, to be based on farmers’ interest, farmers’ input costs and farmers’ strength et al) has always been lacking. The historically lingering ideology has been to romanticize the farmer as the one blessed to feed us all, with no thought whatsoever of whether the farmers are at all able to feed and clothe and generally fend for themselves. A decade back, the Farmers Commission recommended that state procurement prices (or MSP) should be fixed at 50 per cent higher than total input costs. Leave alone accepting it or rejecting this, successive governments have not even engaged with the crucial issue of farmers’ income, leaving it to dusty neglect between the covers of the 10-volume report. This is only one example. The green revolution of the sixties is rightly celebrated as what enabled India to feed itself adequately, rescuing it from the vagaries of PL Alok Sinha Former Chairman Food Corporation of India sensitivities. If onion and sugar prices are shooting up, the reaction is to ban their exports, flood the market with imports and kill whatever chances the farmer had of making a seasonal extra rupee! If arhar dal prices are sky-rocketing, import more dal but never plan a substantial and subsidized help to farmers to grow more dal. India would rather and willy-nilly encourage dal cultivation in foreign lands, which would calm urban consumer sensitivities, while helping the food trader make a killing. Does the country ban the export of manufactured goods or ban the out-migration of nurses and doctors even though they are a scarce commodity in the Indian context? Yet, India must cold-bloodedly ban export of agri crops to curb market prices, a sentiment fuelled entirely by an urban-biased media and a host of development specialists for whom cutting farm produce’s selling prices is fine if it quells the urban fury of rising buying prices. Seemingly, rural populace and urban consumers are two sides of the same coin but Does India ban the export of manufactured goods or the out-migration of nurses and doctors even though they are a scarce commodity in the country? 37 480 imports of American wheat by increasing the country’s farm output more than four times, from an annual crop of 50 million tonnes (mt) to now comfortably crossing 250 million tonnes. The annual farm output seems to have climbed a peak and then become stable on a plateau at between 275 mt and 300 mt. India yearns for a second green revolution but mainly to protect the consumer’s future. Truth to tell, the political economy of Indian agriculture continues to be heavily biased in favour of the urban consumer that gets egged on by a shrill noise in the media over “rising prices”. Witness the hysterical TV debates when prices of onions, sugar and dal shoot up seasonally, only to be soothed by sucking in more imports without a thought (leave alone a debate) on how they would impact domestic farm prices. Hence, apart from wheat and paddy getting “above-market-price” favours, courtesy the Food Corporation of India (FCI) procurement at a government-fixed MSP, every other crop price is ruled by market mechanisms and non-rural their twains are not destined to meet at present. Hence, for the farmer, who looks to the skies for an assurance of a favourable weather not spoiling his harvest, crops other than wheat and paddy are more vulnerable to the vagaries of an unpredictable weather and most farmer suicides are because of failures of such crops. A broadbased crop insurance scheme has been a crying need for decades, especially because two-thirds of India’s cultivated areas are not irrigated are thus dependant on the rain gods. This is all the more a felt need because while wheat and paddy sale are guaranteed by state procurement, these crops hardly ever fail, being assured of both irrigation before the harvest and MSP prices after their harvest. It is really a surprise that whatever crop insurance India has had till now has been in bits and starts, inspite of a strong ideological lineage of rural poverty alleviation schemes packaged in electorally-fired sentiments. Historically, crop insurance schemes were initiated more than four decades back, in 1972 with the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) covering February-March 2016 Farmers’ Forum