Researchers at London School of Economics and Political Science Have Reported New Data on Agricultural Insurance (Crops, Claims and the Politics of Risk In India’s Agricultural Insurance Programme): Agriculture – Agricultural Insurance

2025 SEP 24 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Research findings on Agriculture - Agricultural Insurance are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting originating from London, United Kingdom, by NewsRx editors, the research stated, “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.”

Financial supporters for this research include Wenner-Gren Foundational for Anthropological Research, UCLA International Institute.

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from the London School of Economics and Political Science, “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.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “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.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Crops, Claims and the Politics of Risk In India’s Agricultural Insurance Programme. Environment and Planning A-economy and Space, 2025. Environment and Planning A-economy and Space can be contacted at: Sage Publications Inc, 2455 Teller Rd, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320, USA.

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Tanya Matthan, London School of Economics and Political Science, Dept. of Geography and Environment, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X251365247. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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