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This paper seeks to examine barriers faced by members of a community-based insurance (CBI) scheme, which is targeted at poor women and their families, in accessing scheme benefits. CBI schemes have been developed and promoted as mechanisms to offer protection to poor families from the risks of ill-health, death and loss of assets. However, having voluntarily enrolled in a CBI scheme, poor households may find it difficult or impossible to access scheme benefits. The paper describes the results of qualitative research carried out to assess the barriers faced in accessing scheme benefits by members of the CBI scheme run by the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in Gujarat, India. The study finds that the members face a variety of different barriers, particularly in seeking hospitalization and in submitting insurance claims. Some of the barriers are rooted in factors outside the scheme's control, such as illiteracy and financial poverty amongst members, and inadequacies of the transportation and health care infrastructure. But other barriers relate to the scheme's design and management, for example, lack of clarity among scheme staff regarding the scheme's rules and processes, and requirements that claimants submit documents to prove the validity of their claims. The paper makes recommendations as to how SEWA Insurance can address some of the identified barriers and discusses the relevance of these findings to other CBI schemes in India and elsewhere.

Indian coastal cities are susceptible to climate-induced disasters, like cyclonic storms, floods and sea-level rise, all while existing urbanization challenges amplify vulnerability. Enhancing a city's resilience capacity is a pertinent issue when there are plans to redevelop several of India's cities into 'climate-smart'-this needs a comprehensive city-wide loss and damage assessment. For empirical purposes, this study attempts a loss and damage assessment of the textile industry in Surat city, western India to floods. The advantage is that it estimates indirect loss and damage and also considers compensation as a positive externalitymostly ignored by disaster assessment agencies. The results suggest that: (a) an average of 49 days was required to come back to normalcy when the flood water remained for 4 days; (b) most of the labourers out-migrated during post-flood scenario, and hence, shortage of labour was reported as major issue; (c) the mean loss and damage was approximately `1.51 million, around 23 per cent of an industry's total profit, with `1 million indirect losses, which reinforces it to be factored into the disaster's impact cost assessment and (d) owners' risk perception about potential impacts of future floods is moderate, which may lead to a lack of investment in planned adaptation. Such type of study provides insights into the city's resilience capacity to future disasters, urging to conduct such analysis across the Indian cities.

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