Vol. 12, Issue 4 (2023)

Author(s):
M Mary Sharon, B Aparna, S Rajeswari and B Ravindra Reddy

Abstract:
Agriculture is varied, diversified and prone to a variety of risks. Agricultural insurance is considered an important mechanism to effectively reduce the risk and increase income resulting from various manmade and natural events. This study investigated the impact of crop insurance schemes viz., Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) and Weather based Crop Insurance Scheme (WBCIS) on risk minimization and determinants of farmers Willingness to Pay (WTP) for crop insurance in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh. Anantapur district comes under drought prone area and three stage stratified purposive cum random sampling design was adopted to select the sample of 120 farmers. The results from Simpson Diversification Index (SID) revealed that greater difference of diversification index between insured and non-insured farmers was observed in Kambadur mandal with the value of 0.73 for insured and 0.79 for non-insured. The results of Binary Logistic Regression showed that family size, accessibility to credit, annual income, access to information, awareness about the crop insurance schemes and extent of irrigation were the significant factors influencing the farmers about the insurance.These findings suggested that Crop insurance should cover the individual risk and also large scale awareness building programmes should be conducted with the collaboration of local banks and farmer groups to increase the coverage.