TG Farmers Walking Into El Nino Year Without Crop Insurance
The threat from a poor monsoon has set off alarm bells that Telangana’s farmers do not have a crop insurance scheme they can count on in case of a cropping disaster in the Kharif season
Hyderabad: Tens of lakhs of farmers in Telangana are expected to keep their fingers crossed that the crops they raise this Kharif season will survive the predicted poor monsoon season, not suffer any weather event-related damages, or wilt in drought-like conditions, or fall prey to pests.
With nearly 55 lakh to 60 lakh “active farmers” — if not all of the around 73 lakh beneficiaries of the Rythu Bharosa input subsidy scheme — expected to get busy with the new crop season, the threat from a poor monsoon has set off alarm bells that Telangana’s farmers do not have a crop insurance scheme they can count on in case of a cropping disaster in the Kharif season.
The then BRS government withdrew the state from the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana in 2019, and the Congress, in its manifesto, said it would reintroduce the insurance and, in 2024, announced that Telangana was rejoining Fasal Bima Yojana and would begin implementing it from the 2024 Kharif crop season, but that decision remained an announcement with no follow-up action.
“This year, too, there is no crop insurance in Telangana. The government has to issue a notification a month or so ahead of the beginning of the crop season, and so far there has been no such announcement,” Ravi Kanneganti, from Rythu Swarajya Vedika, a NGO working with farmers, on farmers' issues, said.
“This year, given the way the monsoon season is expected to be, farmers could be facing a disastrous crop season. The rains are expected to be poor and sporadic. Rivers and reservoirs are likely to experience low water levels because of poor rains, and groundwater availability too will be impacted. Crop insurance is the only safety net they will have,” he said.
According to data from the Central government, prior to the state walking away from the PM Fasal Bima Yojana, as many as 39,04,037 farmers in the state had enrolled in the scheme, and 1,221,538 farmers had received `1,906.38 crore as insurance benefits.
Incidentally, in 2025, Telangana farmers saw their crops destroyed or severely damaged in around 4.47 lakh acres from just Cyclone Montha alone in October, with reports of crops in several tens of thousands of acres suffering damage at different levels due to heavy rains and floods in the Kharif season months preceding the cyclone.
