Impact of Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme on Grape Beneficiary Farmers

Abstract

Agriculture in India is extremely vulnerable to incidence of extreme weather events which leads to agrarian distress. Farmers are sensitive to agricultural risks and, as a result require insurance. Climate variability and extreme weather events have become a great threat to agricultural production in India. The projected increase in droughts, floods, heat and cold waves, cyclones, extreme precipitation events will result in greater instability in food production. Grape fruit crop is extremely sensitive to climate change; year by year many farmers are indebted due to very meager yields. Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) is one such scheme which was recent crop insurance launch by Government of India to mitigate the hardship of the insured farmers against the likelihood of financial loss on account  of  crop  loss  resulting  from  adverse  weather conditions.  Grape fruit crop was taken into consideration to assess the impact of the ‘RWBCIS’ on beneficiaries.  The study was conducted in the year 2021-2022 in Nasik district of Maharashtra state. The sample consists of total 150 farmers, 75 beneficiary farmers and 75 non-beneficiary farmers of RWBCIS. With the help of tools like Crop diversification, Cropping intensity and Incremental cost benefit ratio an attempt is made to find out the impact of the RBWCIS on beneficiary farmers in comparison to non-beneficiary farmers. The results showed that there is no significant difference in crop diversification and cropping intensity between the two groups. Also, there is no noticeable difference between the creditworthiness of beneficiary and non-beneficiary farmers of RWBCIS. Incremental Cost Benefit Ratio for beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries was more or less unity. There is no noticeable impact of RWBCIS on Grape beneficiary farmers.