The Telangana government wants insurance companies to review the manner in which they assess agricultural loses by putting the interests of the farmer front and centre.
“If an industrialist makes losses for whatever reason, insurance firms will assess losses at his unit. But when a farmer is faced with crop loss, the same firms take the village as a unit for assessment. This must be changed,” says Telangana Agriculture Minister Pocharam Srinivas Reddy.
“We passed a resolution in the Assembly asking the Centre to craft crop insurance policies that protect the interests of individual farmers,” he added.
“Should we have to pray for loss of crops for the entire village so that the individual farmer gets compensation,” he asks, rhetorically.
During an interaction with farmers as they prepare for the kharif season, he noted that farmers were in serious distress, and were forced to depend on banks for their working capital needs year after year. “Industrialists, on the other hand, need working capital loans for at most a year or two,” he pointed out.
The Minister noted that there used to be long hours of power cuts in the undivided Andhra Pradesh. “But the TRS government in Telangana has provided uninterrupted power to farmers. In the next three years, the power situation will improve further,” he said.
While asking farmers to cut down on the area under cotton cultivation, he said the State had asked the seed companies to adopt villages and help farmers achieve self-reliance in seed production.