 "A farmer sprays a mixture of fertilizer and pesticide onto his wheat crop on the outskirts of Ahmedabad")
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ambitious programme to provide a social security net to millions of farmers across the country through a crop insurance scheme might remain a pipe-dream for many unless states develop a proper mechanism to include land lease-holders within its ambit.
Officials said though the scheme, in principle, includes lease-holders, it may be difficult to implement that on the ground as most states have yet not modernised and legalised their land lease systems.
Land being a state subject, the best the Centre can do is to try and convince them to change existing systems.
Lessee farmers in most states don’t have the right to access credit, and insurance and lease agreements are also not yet standardised.
“Lessee farmers would become part of the scheme only if the state governments allow the same, because in most states land laws do not allow lease farmers to avail benefits from insurance or credit,” a senior official said.
A paper on the status of land lease agreements prepared by T Haque, a former chairman of the Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP), showed that though the area under tenancy declined from about 35.7% of the total cultivated area at the time of independence to 7.1% in 2003.
Although, the number looks very small at present, but experts believe that there is large-scale concealment of tenancy and oral tenancy, which makes it all the more difficult to distinguish land-owners from tenants.
Till September 2006, about 12.6 million tenants on 16.7 million acres of land were conferred either ownership or occupancy rights by Government of India, but this also prompted landlords to secure mass eviction of tenants, sub-tenants and sharecroppers.
The paper said that while tenants were given occupancy right over about 4% of total land, they were evicted from about 30% of the same.
“Concealed tenancy or oral tenancy exists in all parts of the country who are the most insecure,” the paper also added.
It is these vulnerable groups of farmers who might remain deprived from the ambitious insurance scheme, even though they are most impacted by crop loss.
The 59th Round of NSSO data showed that around 57% of the leased area in kharif season and 54% in rabi season were on short-term leases, that is for less than two years and did not have any tenurial security or stability. Share-cropping was the most dominant form of tenancy in the country.
Incidentally, the new crop insurance scheme seeks to charge an insurance premium of 2% on all kharif sown crops from farmers and 1.5% for all rabi crops.
This clearly shows that unless states move quickly and decisively on legalizing and modernizing their tenancy laws, large segment of India’s farming population would continue to remain deprived from government policies on insurance and credit, which also puts the success of the schemes like the crop insurance scheme under question.
