Is Rainfall Insurance a New Idea-Pioneering Work Revisited

Agricultural insurance, especially crop insurance, exists in many countries as an institutional response to agricultural risk. The issue of whether crop insurance can work has been intensely debated during the last decade. In view of the problems faced by crop insurance schemes in some countries, a suggestion for rainfall insurance has received attention in the recent literature. Interestingly, J S Chakravarti designed, as early as in 1920, a scheme of agricultural insurance based on rainfall for India. It is a pioneering work on agricultural insurance. Surprisingly, this piece of work, which is probably one of the earliest monographs on the subject does not appear to have been accounted for in the analytical literature on agricultural insurance.