PM Fasal Bima Yojana

Imagine a farmer who puts months of labour and money into a crop, only to lose most of it to an unexpected hailstorm or drought. This is a real risk every farmer faces every season, and unlike a salaried employee, a farmer has no employer-provided safety net to fall back on.

PMFBY, or Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, was launched in 2016 to turn this unpredictable, potentially crop-destroying risk into something insured and manageable. It is India's flagship crop insurance scheme.

The scale of the scheme is genuinely large. In 2025 alone, across the Kharif and Rabi growing seasons (explained in more detail elsewhere on this site), there were 13.48 crore farmer applications. Of these, 10.68 crore were 'loanee' farmers, meaning they had taken a Kisan Credit Card loan or another seasonal farm loan, explained elsewhere on this site. The remaining 2.77 crore were 'non-loanee' farmers who chose to enrol voluntarily. The total budget for the scheme through 2025-26 is Rs 69,515.71 crore.

The scheme's real problem is not its design, it is how well it actually gets carried out. Farmers have widely complained about delayed payments, claims being rejected for unclear reasons, and field surveys after crop damage that were not thorough enough. As of recent reporting, nearly Rs 947 crore in claims from 2020-21 through 2023-24 were still pending. That is a real gap between the insurance promise and farmers actually getting paid when their crops genuinely fail.

In 2025, the government made PMFBY voluntary rather than mandatory for loanee farmers. This reflects a genuine trade-off. Mandatory enrolment meant more farmers were covered and risks were spread across a bigger pool. But it also forced farmers who had lost trust in the claims process to stay enrolled anyway. Whether making it voluntary improves trust in the scheme, or simply means fewer farmers are covered, is something worth watching as enrolment numbers come in under the new voluntary system.