For farmer Makhan Singh Mewada, the 2025 kharif season ended long before harvest time. A combination of unseasonal rains and animal attacks destroyed more than a third of the soya bean he had sown on his 2-hectare field in Khamaliya village, located in Madhya Pradesh’s Sehore district.
Mewada, who also grows wheat, garlic and onion on the field, hoped to recover at least a part of what he had lost from the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY)—the Union government’s flagship crop insurance scheme. But the compensation he was counting on remains out of reach. Even a year after submitting his claim, Mewada has no update from the insurer and no payment in hand. As a new kharif season begins, the farmer questions whether the insurance meant to protect him can truly measure his losses. “I cannot trust that the insurer has the complete picture. The satellites they use cannot see what eyes can. I am unsure of how they would have calculated the claim amount,” he says.
Mewada is not the only farmer with insurance qualms. In 2024-25, farmers and unions in multiple districts of Madhya Pradesh mounted protests, claiming that insurance payouts were too low to cover their losses despite high premiums being paid.
Data from the PMFBY dashboard (as on March 1, 2026) also shows that claim disbursal has been declining. For instance, between 2018 and 2024, claim amounts disbursed in Bhopal, Sehore and Vidisha districts dropped from a total of R217.91 crore to R55.2 crore in the kharif season; and from R110.5 crore to just R9.28 crore in the rabi season.
These trends evoke concern because Madhya Pradesh is at the centre of a major shift in crop insurance assessment. For the past three years, the state has been implementing a technology-driven approach called the Yield Estimation System based on Technology (YES-TECH). The framework, introduced by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) in 2023, is specifically used to estimate crop yields in a particular season, on the basis of which PMFBY officials assess claims of crop losses and disburse insurance payouts. The framework prescribes five models which use satellite-based remote sensing, weather data and analytical models to estimate crop yields. The aim is to provide an alternative to manual crop-cutting experiments (CCEs). CCEs, used widely under PMFBY, involve local revenue officials …
This article was originally published in the August 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth