Looting of crop insurance.


The government comes up with an insurance scheme to cover agricultural losses due to natural and man-made calamities. By paying a small premium, the farmer can protect himself from calamities, but the experience of insurance schemes run by domestic and foreign companies shows that crop insurance actually helps the companies make more money than the farmers. It is the responsibility of the government to compensate farmers for crop loss due to natural calamities. For compensation, the central and state governments together provide about Rs 20 to 25 thousand crores every year in the agriculture budget.

But the government came up with a scheme called 'Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Scheme' to provide compensation, so that the companies are benefiting and not the farmers. Companies which have nothing to do with agriculture are being given huge benefits just to share returns. Due to drought, farmers' rights are being handed over to crop insurance companies. To compensate farmers under crop insurance scheme Rs. 28,847 crore, central and state governments Rs. 1, 96, 228 crores were handed over to crop insurance companies in seven years. During these years, 46.92 crore farmers joined the 'Pak Bima Yojana', out of which only 12.98 crore farmers have received compensation. In this, crores of farmers got very little compensation. 33.94 crore farmers got nothing, instead these farmers had to bear the loss of insurance premium amount deposited every year.

Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Yojana e. S. It was started in 2016. Available government figures from 2016-17 to 2022-23 reveal that crop insurance companies have looted Rs 60,000 crore at the rate of Rs 8,000 to 10,000 crore per year in the last seven years. Rs 12,484 crores have been looted from Maharashtra, Rs 10,524 crores from Rajasthan, Rs 9,777 crores from Madhya Pradesh and Rs 6,628 crores from Gujarat. It seems that for this big loot the crop insurance companies work with the intention of influencing the farmer voters to give the government an electoral advantage. Compensation is distributed only in election years. In the year 2017-18, 5894 crore rupees, 5812 crore rupees in the year 2019-20 and 7791 crore rupees in the year 2020-21 have been given compensation in Madhya Pradesh.

Which is more than the premium received by the companies in that year. Madhya Pradesh held assembly elections in November 2018, Lok Sabha elections in May 2019 and assembly by-elections to 28 seats in November 2020, while companies in Madhya Pradesh collected insurance premiums totaling Rs 35,506 crore. Of this, Rs 25,729 crore was given as compensation to farmers and Rs 9,777 crore was looted by companies. This also means that returns in other years were negligible. Now Maharashtra government is starting crop insurance scheme. Although farmers are benefiting from this, but here the farmers' insurance premium has to be paid to the companies by cutting the agricultural budget, due to which the farmers will also suffer.

Even though the government claims that it wants to eliminate the middlemen who loot the farmers, here the government itself has created corporate middlemen who earn Rs 10,000 crores per year just for distributing the compensation. Private insurance companies are also leaders in this robbery. Punjab, Bihar and West Bengal have already opted out of this scheme. Now Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and Jharkhand have also discontinued the scheme due to low claim payments. Farmers are already being exploited in agriculture due to anti-farmer policies of the government. The government has not taken any steps to provide fair prices for crops and stop the looting by companies in cost, but businessmen and traders have been allowed to exploit the farmers. Now the central government is benefiting the insurance companies by entrusting the companies with the task of compensating the losses incurred in natural calamities.

In principle, it is wrong to implement an insurance scheme to compensate for losses, due to which companies receive a large share of the agricultural budget every year and farmers suffer losses. Instead of making insurance companies agents for distribution of compensation, a direct method with the help of the agriculture department would have been adopted to the farmers of the country, which could have got Rs 60,000 crore more, that too if the corruption in the agriculture department had been kept in check.

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