Voluntary enrollment in Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana — Our scheme, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana has ensured risk mitigation and provided insurance cover for all farmers. We will make enrolment of farmers under the scheme voluntary.

The 2019 promise on crop insurance is narrow and precise, and precision makes it easy to check: "We will make enrolment of farmers under the scheme voluntary."

Until then, enrolment was compulsory for loanee farmers — anyone who had taken a crop loan was automatically insured and the premium deducted. The change was made from the Kharif 2020 season, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare states the current position plainly: the scheme "is voluntary for the States as well as farmers". On the promise as written, delivered, and within about a year.

What that change revealed is the more interesting part. A large share of the scheme's headline coverage had been automatic rather than chosen. Once farmers could opt out, many did, and the enrolment base fell in the seasons after 2020 before recovering as states rejoined and the scheme was redesigned. Voluntariness is better policy on almost any view — a farmer should not be insured without knowing it — but it also means the "insurance cover for all farmers" the manifesto claims in the same paragraph became harder to sustain.

On how the scheme performs for the farmers who do enrol, the ministry's own table for 2022-23 to 2024-25, as on 31 December 2025, gives the national totals: 40,76,52,900 applications enrolled, 1,749.35 lakh hectares insured, ₹10,544.28 crore paid by farmers in premium, ₹58,862.84 crore of claims reported and ₹54,883.28 crore of claims paid.

Two readings of that. Farmers put in ₹10,544 crore and received ₹54,883 crore — the subsidised premium structure works heavily in their favour, which is the scheme's point. And roughly ₹3,980 crore of reported claims, about seven per cent, had not been paid at the cut-off date. The concentration matters more than the average: Andhra Pradesh shows ₹3,793.60 crore of claims reported against ₹751.94 crore paid, which is most of the national shortfall in one state.

The ministry names the causes without minimising them: "(a) delay in providing State Government share of subsidy (b) non-payment/delayed payment or under payment of claims on account of incorrect/delayed submission of insurance proposals by banks (c) discrepancy in yield data & consequent disputes between State Government and insurance companies". A 12 per cent penalty on delayed payment is now auto-calculated on the National Crop Insurance Portal, and yield estimation is being moved onto technology — YES-TECH remote sensing carrying 30 per cent weight for paddy and wheat since Kharif 2023, and WINDS expanding the automatic weather station network fivefold.

No CAG performance audit of the scheme covering this period is in our corpus, so all of this is the ministry's own account. The promise made in 2019 was kept; the scheme it applied to still leaves a farmer in a disputing state waiting. Our verdict is lacks context.