Context: Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) have developed an early warning system called Farmers Distress Index to predict farmer’s woes before happening.

What is Agrarian distress?

• Agrarian distress or Farmers’ distress refers to the economic, political, and social challenges faced by farmers and rural communities due to factors such as low crop yields, fluctuating prices of agricultural produce, high input costs, indebtedness, and lack of access to credit, markets, and infrastructure.

• It is a recurring problem in dryland and drought-prone areas of India.

What is Farmers Distress Index?

• Farmers Distress Index is developed by Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture(CRIDA), an institute of ICAR to identify and minimize the agrarian distress in the form of crop loss or failure and income shock to farmers.

• The Development of this index is part of the NABARD-funded project on Farmers Distress and Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY).

The index will have values from 0-1, where:

• 0-0.5 will indicate low distress

• 0.5-0.7 will indicate moderate distress

• above 0.7 will indicate severe distress.

Benefits of Farmers Distress Index

• This index will help in measuring the severity of the probable distress and inform the local governments to take timely action to reduce the severity.

• It will try to anticipate this distress and prevent its spread from a few farmers to the village or block level and allowing governments and other agencies to take preventive steps.

Effects of farmer’s distress

• As per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 10,269 farmers committed suicides in 2019 and the most cited reason was high indebtedness or their inability to pay back loans.

About Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA)

• CRIDA is a constituent organization of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), an autonomous body of Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.

• It strives towards development and popularization of location specific rainfed technologies for productivity enhancement.