About 50% of Maharashtra farmers are unhappy with the performance and implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), says a report, highlighting the agriculturists’ demands for lower premium, higher compensation for losses, faster paperwork and timely compensation. The report, ‘Performance Evaluation of Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana in Maharashtra’, was brought out by the Agro-Economic Research Centre of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE) under the sponsorship of the Union ministry of agriculture and farmers’ welfare. It was authored by Sangeeta Shroff and Manasi Phadke. Calling for improvement in the implementation of the PMFBY, the report suggested that the government should study specific grievances recorded under the scheme to identify the exact pain points of farmers. While awareness about the scheme was high that did not improve enrollment as farmers’ experience was that compensation payments were never done on time and the documentation requirements were cumbersome, the report noted. Also, farmers were not conversant with yield estimation through crop cutting experiments and this caused distrust and conflicts between farmers and insurance companies, it said. Sampling for the study was done in three clusters of Maharashtra based on the level of insured areas and was carried out in Jalna, Amravati and Pune covering a total of 150 farmers. Farmers were classified as loanee farmers and non-loanee farmers and survey done during Kharif 2016 season and Rabi 2017. Farmers across the country are miffed with crop insurance, directing their anger at insurance companies over non-payment of claims and underestimation of losses. Farmers’ protest have forced Maharashtra to look into the alleged irregularities. According to the study, the PMFBY was designed to automatically give insurance cover to farmers but since the poorest of poor farmers as well as loan defaulters do not take their entire credit from formal sources they end up getting precluded from participation in the scheme. These farmers have stayed away from voluntary registration too. The PMFBY was supposed to use technology in the processes but this has been minimal and both farmers and insurance companies have to depend on archaic manual methods to estimate crop yield and crop losses, says the GIPE study. Remote sensing and UAV imagery are some of the tools suggested by the study to estimate farm yield at village level. The report also highlighted the challenges insurance companies have to face under the PMFBY scheme. Adverse selection was a problem for these companies as there was higher participation of farmers in drought prone areas where crop failure was a common occurrence while in areas where rainfall was assured and there was less risk of crop failure the participation was low. The report said that because of this adverse selection the scheme will invariably run into huge fiscal deficit for the government. Another issue faced by insurance companies was that farmers took insurance cover for more risky crops but grew crops that were less risky. In the process, the farmers were able to claim indemnity for the more risky crop which normally failed, the study said. For the central and state governments, the study identified the main challenge as obtaining data on area under notified crops and the exact yield in blocks where these crops were cultivated. Fixing the yield on the basis of manual crop cutting estimates was not foolproof and did not give a good picture of yield estimates, it added. Source - https://www.financialexpress.com