The research leading to this paper was undertaken at ICRIER as a part of the project “Supporting Indian Farms the Smart Way: Rationalising Subsidies and Investments for Faster, Inclusive and Sustainable Growth”. The project is supported by Syngenta Foundation to which we are grateful. We would like to thank Dr. Marco Ferroni, Dr. Yuan
Zhou, and Baskar Reddy, of Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture for their detailed and very useful comments. The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable comments from officers of various insurance companies, Dr. Ashish Kumar Bhutani, Joint Secretary (Credit and Cooperation), Government of India, Dr. Shibendu S. Ray, Director of Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre, Scott Sindelar, former Minister Counselor, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Embassy in India, Rajeev Chawla, Additional Chief Secretary, Karnataka and Vinod Kumar Singh, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Uttar Pradesh. Our special thanks are due to Prof. Anwarul Hoda, Chair Professor of ICRIER’s Trade Policy and WTO Research Programme and Mr Umesh Mongia, Associate Vice President at ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Limited for their helpful comments and suggestions to improve the paper.
