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(ii) Agricultural Insurance, Risk Preventive Measures and Remote
Sensing for Crop Surveillance as Effective Alternatives to Loan
Waivers and Other Short-Term Palliatives for Resolving Farmers’
Risks
As presented earlier, all the four agricultural insurance products have
involved annual claims ranging from
`
1,831 crore to
`
5159 crore during the
last four years. When the coverage increases, the claims would of course jump
up but even if it jumps much higher, it would be still be better than incurring
over
`
50,000 crore of budgetary resources in some years which would be at the
cost of many a development programme.
We have described in an earlier section the possibilities of many
insurance products, one important of which is the weather-based insurance
system which is critically dependent on the availability of accurate weather
data on a daily basis and the improved density of weather stations. In this
respect, the series of steps being taken to fine tune the FASAL scheme for using
remote sensing for a number of purposes, apart from forecasting crop area
and weather in remote parts of the country, should go a long way in perfecting
different insurance products. This would be a much more scientific way of
addressing the problems of farmers rather than loan waiver.
Besides agricultural insurance, risk preventive measures should
constitute an important component of resolving the farmers’ risk issues. There
are three issues which come to our mind in this respect:
(a) Risk preventive measures should consist of better water
supplies in water stress periods, reducing ground water stress
by grounding well-designed ground water recharge programmes
through dug-well recharge, tank recharge and strengthening of
water harvesting structures. For facilitating these water supply
programmes, we propose to suggest an out-of-the-box idea
which, according to us, is workable, and that is, the use of strong
water pipes to pump up and move water from areas of surplus
water in big rivers to the nearby dry places. These pipes should
be similar to the pipes that are being used for carrying petroleum
products today. Miles and miles of water pipes can be installed
for this purpose and water can be pulled from surplus rivers and
deposited in deserts and dry areas where the ground water levels
could be augmented. We realise that as yet this is a sketchy idea
and we would be able firm it up once it is accepted in principle.
