Work

Crops, claims and the politics of risk in India’s agricultural insurance programme

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper examines the dynamics of the Pradhan Mantri Faisal Bima Yojana, a state-subsidized and privately operationalized agricultural insurance programme in India. While promoters of such index-based insurance programmes maintain that it functions as a tool of income stabilization and climate adaptation for rural communities, critics argue that it facilitates the individualization of risk and erosion of social networks of support. Drawing on ethnographic research in central India, this paper instead shows that insurance produces a complex mutuality of interest that binds agriculturalists together in uneven but significant ways. In the context of increasing climatic uncertainty and declining state investment in agriculture, it is retooled into an object of political negotiation and claim-making, reshaping relations between cultivators and the state. Focusing on the specific form of index insurance, I show how it can abstract from concrete and diverse experiences of crop loss but in doing so, constructs a collective unit of risk and responsibility. Examining the constitutive tensions of the insurance form – between public and private, individual and collective – this paper draws attention to the potentiality of insurance as a fraught space of collective redress within a climate-changing Indian countryside.

Source: Environment and Planning A Economy and Space

DOI: 10.1177/0308518x251365247

Author: Tanya Matthan

Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science

Language: English

Topic: Agricultural risk and resilience

Subfield: Soil Science

Field: Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Domain: Life Sciences

SDGs: Zero hunger, Peace, justice, and strong institutions, No poverty

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,900