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

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.