Sowing In Uncertainty: The Climate Insurance Gap For India's Farmers
- IJLLR Journal
- Jul 5
- 2 min read
Archita, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Pune, Lavasa Campus
1. Introduction
The climate change issue is in fact one of the major problems that Indian agriculture has to deal with. On top of that, India has to deal with the difficulty of shrinking landholdings, degrading natural resources and monsoon dependency. A report by NABARD titled Climate Change and Risk Management in Indian Agriculture has given strong proof that Indian average temperatures have been steadily increasing and that an increase of 1.57°C is likely to occur under the RCP4.5 scenario by the year 2099. As a result, India is experiencing more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts, floods, heat waves and cyclones. Despite this, the impacts of these shocks are not the same in all regions. The varied agro-climatic zones have their specific climate-related problems: coastal zones are becoming more and more susceptible to cyclones, saline-water intrusion and flooding; the arid and semi-arid regions of western and central India are suffering from drought cycles of increasing frequency; and the Indo-Gangetic basin is now seeing at times droughts, heat waves and floods co-existing, thus making agriculture less and less viable.
A NABARD report mentions that a single year of drought conceivably leads to a decrease of household incomes by 25-60%, to the taking of debts, to the selling of animals, and even to the loss of properties. As the weather becomes more extreme, farmers would have lost their savings and their loan interests would have gone up. Farmers would find themselves in a much worse and more vulnerable position which would expose them to the cycles of chronic indebtedness followed by death or suicides in some instances. Under such conditions, agricultural insurance schemes are not only playing the role of financial intermediaries but also becoming a vital social safety net that can actually help the farmers to bounce back from the climate-induced shocks.
