Work 05 · North East India · 2025
Crop insurance in India's North East
The Northeast leads India in crop insurance uptake — but in some of its states, farmers pay 60–90% of premiums the national scheme promises to subsidize.
A visual policy report on the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), India's "One Nation-One Scheme" crop insurance program, using enrollment and premium data from 2018 to 2022. Normalized by farmer population, the Northeast emerges as the country's leader in insurance penetration, with growth arriving in waves as the scheme reached state after state.
Splitting the premium data by scheme tells a different story. Under the weather-based WBCIS, government covers 75–85% of premiums in every state. Under yield-based PMFBY, a group of states that includes Sikkim and Meghalaya inverts that structure, leaving farmers to pay 60–90%. The Northeast's headline success therefore hides two realities, subsidized expansion in Assam and Tripura and farmer-funded enrollment elsewhere. The report closes with options for restoring uniform subsidy-sharing. Built with Python and Altair.