Most houses in this once infamous village are locked with inhabitants missing, as crop failure in parts of Andhra Pradesh has triggered flight of farm labourers to greener pastures. Kappatralla, which has seen at least 50 faction murders over the past two decades, is witnessing appalling scenes of human misery with farmers getting paltry insurance amount after huge crop losses. Kappatralla, has now been adopted by former Kurnool superintendent of police AK Ravi Krishna, resulting in the opening of Andhra Pragati Grameena bank in the village to help farmers get loans. “The factionism has gone. The drinking water problem is under control after Ravi Krishna helped us to build a water purification plant and sourced water from a borewell,” said K Harischandra, a villager. “But all our hopes have been dealt a blow by this year’s drought,” he added. Farmers raise fingers at the apathy of agri officials While the sum assured is Rs 40,000 per hectare, each farmer gets only Rs 2,990 per acre, despite losing his entire crop. Many of the farmers do not have any information about the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, a crop insurance scheme. “I invested around Rs 15,000 per acre by taking loans, but the yield was only one sack of groundnut per acre. None of the agricultural officers visited us and we don’t have any knowledge about the insurance scheme,” said B Muniswamy, a farmer who lost his groundnut crop due to the drought in the kharif season. When TOI visited Kapatralla, some farmers who have not migrated seemed curious about the visitors. They wondered whether help had arrived. “Onion crop in 10 acres has dried up. I suffered Rs 20,000 loss per acre,” said Golla Rangamamma, a woman farmer of the village. A Hariprasad, manager of Andhra Pragati Grameena Bank at Kappatralla, told TOI how they have disbursed ?8.38 crore loan to around 971 people this year for kharif and rabi crops, to farmers from four villages, including Kappatralla, Jilledubudakala, Madhapuram and Obulapuram. “Each loan is renewed for most farmers. We fix the premium, when farmers take crop loans for weather-based insurance scheme. For groundnut crop, the rate is Rs 900 per hectare. We have processed around 675 claims under the scheme. The insurance company has settled claims for 2017-18 where Rs 2,990 was given per acre. Under PM Fasal Bima Yojana, for crops like cotton and onion, around 29 farmers got registered,” Hariprasad said. But farmers alleged that insurance companies and agricultural officers have failed to do proper assessment, leading to less insurance amount. Kurnool district collector S Satyanarayana added that the insurance amount was paid to the consumer as per the assessed damage of the crop by assessors of the insurance company. Source - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com