A patriot must always be prepared to defend his country against his own government, goes an old saying. The farmers of Gujarat find themselves in precisely such a predicament. First, they face ruin from the elements and then need to be saved from a government which has set out to save them.
The immediate provocation for such a reaction came from Bharat Zala, director of Citizens Resource & Action Initiative (CRANTI), an NGO, after the Vijay Rupani-led BJP government replaced the existing crop insurance scheme and set up a separate fund to compensate for crop failure. The state government, it is learnt, has got an in-principle nod from the centre for the fund which is likely to have an annual corpus of over Rs 3,000 crore. The centre will make available its 50 percent share of the insurance which was hitherto being given to private insurance funds.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), launched in April 2016, was aimed at providing crop insurance to farmers in case of crop destruction due to natural factors. Instead, the scheme has become a profit-making enterprise for private insurance companies with inordinate delays in settling compensation cases and large-scale rejections.
Farmers believe that not even 20 percent of the total claims submitted by them have been approved. The crop insurance premium burden is shared by the state and the centre in a ratio of 49 percent each, while the farmers bear two percent of it.
Zala, an indefatigable crusader for farmer rights, even went to the Supreme Court. In 2013, he moved the apex court through CRANTI over the issue of farmer suicides. At the time, the centre was forced to admit that there were over 12,000 suicides in the agriculture sector every year. Realising the magnitude of the crisis, the Court expanded the scope of his petition, which was confined to Gujarat, to encompass the entire country. It asked the centre to frame a policy to deal with the root cause of the problem. The case was fought by well-known lawyer Colin Gonsalves virtually free for CRANTI. “In fact, the lawyer would even fund my travel to Delhi,” said Zala.
Interestingly, during the 2014 general election, farmer suicides in Gujarat were the subject of a slanging match between then Chief Minister Narendra Modi and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal. Kejriwal’s stance was that 5,874 farmers had committed suicide in the state in the last 10 years, while Modi said that only one farmer had killed himself due to crop failure. The actual figure given to Zala, in response to an RTI plea, is 692 suicides between 2003 and 2012 when Modi held the reins of the state.
Attorney General KK Venugopal’s plea to the Supreme Court, furnishing details of PMFBY, was that it was the panacea for almost all the ills plaguing the sector and it would provide insurance cover for all stages of the crop cycle, including post-harvest risk. The Court noted that a scheme of such proportions needed time to be implemented and granted the same.
However, the Congress leader in the Gujarat assembly, Paresh Dhanani, went on record last year, alleging that this was a scam. “By making this central scheme mandatory for farmers and bringing in private players instead of the Agriculture Insurance Company (AIC) of India, the NDA government is pulling off a scam of Rs 1 lakh crore, eventually benefitting private insurance companies,” he said.
The AIC, he said, earlier insured crops of farmers who opted for it voluntarily. “But after the NDA came to power in 2014, the AIC was replaced by private insurance companies and farmers were forced to go for the renamed Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana.” Dhanani claimed that private players were now being paid a hefty premium of over 50 percent from the state and central treasuries.
“In my constituency in Amreli district, 41 percent of the insurance premium was agreed to be paid to the insurance companies by the government in 2015. The figure was 53 percent in 2016 and 55 percent in 2017-18. Farmers pay two percent, while the rest is paid by the state and the centre. This comes to roughly over Rs 1,00,000 crore which has been paid to private insurance companies across the country. These companies have not even carried out proper surveys for claims assessment,” he said.
