Abstract:
Agricultural Insurance is a means of protecting the agriculturist against financial losses due to uncertainties that may arise agricultural losses arising from named or all unforeseen perils beyond their control. Unfortunately, agricultural insurance in the state has not made much headway even though the need to protect odisha farmers from agriculture variability has been a continuing concern of agriculture policy. The farming community in odisha consists of about 2.5 million farmers of which only about 10 per cent avail crop loans from financial institutions and only three fourth of those are insured. The remaining 80 per cent are either self-financing or depend upon informal sources for their financial requirements. Most of the farmers are illiterate and do not understand the procedural and other requirements of formal financial institutions and, therefore, shy away from them. Therefore, while the institutional loanees are insured compulsorily under the NAIS, only about 15 per cent of the non-loanee farmers avail insurance cover voluntarily. This is quite indicative of the enormous insurance potential that exists for addressing the needs of the farming community and en hancing the overall efficiencies as also the competitiveness of the agriculture sector. This also signifies the tremendous potential of agriculture insurance in odisha as a concept, which can mitigate the adverse impacts that such uncertainties would have on the individual farmers.
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