The working group on risk management in
Need fora Nationally Consistent Database
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| 5.3. Need fora Nationally Consistent Database The Government of India has been collecting, collating and publishing data periodically on various aspects of the economy. Government, researchers and others use these databases to understand the past and current situation and also prepare plans for the future. As we move to more a interdependent and globalized world, the quality of databases become an important determinant in responding to the challenges. For example, crop insurance is becoming increasingly important, in helping to manage risk at farm levels. To implement insurance schemes, we need accurate data on crop yields and acreage at the individual and aggregated levels, to decide actuarial premium and timely data to decide the indemnity payments. Today, agricultural insurance is suffering due to lack of both accurate data as well as timely availability. It takes 3 - 5 months to get CCE data from the time of harvest of crops. Such long delays make insurance payment meaningless, for farmers who have suffered huge losses and have no other means to fallback on. In the current context of extreme distress in agriculture, a good insurance plan which can make immediate payment to farmers, can help alleviate distress. Since, we do not have a proper system of collecting, compiling and publishing data within reasonable amounts of time, farmers suffer, and insurance as an avenue for mitigating distress is ineffective. Therefore planning and implementation of vital policies and programmes are severely handicapped by the inadequate data generating / publishing processes. Despite current technological advancements in data capture, storage and data transmission, Government machinery does not seem to have paid adequate attention to use the currently available technology to evolve a data capturing, collating, storing and transmission system. Therefore sufficient efforts need to be made to make it a national priority to upgrade database management systems in order to help government and other agencies to help plan and implement various policies, programs and schemes for the benefit of the farmers. The Working Group recommends that the government creates a nationally consistent database of all agricultural statistics, meteorological data, which would go along way in expediting claims processing in crop insurance, and inappropriate design & rating of these products, not to mention the macro level applications for the government policy making. The broad action plan suggested is: (i). Create centralized data management system to accept incoming data from all states (ii). Develop practical action strategy to train personnel on data formatting / management procedures as well as new data management system (iii). Take existing program data and blend in historical data from all states (iv). Clean historical data maintaining both the original values and the cleaned values (v). Create a web deployed data visualization tool (vi). Develop formal data monitoring / auditing review techniques to be implemented annually Agriculture Insurance Company of India perhaps could work as the nodal agency on the project with facilitation and support from the government. |