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In recent years, in many parts of the country, indebtedness, crop failures, unpaid prices and poor returns have resulted in agrarian distress. The government has identified and introduced several programs to address these critical issues viz. crop insurance, lending waivers etc. among them. Crop insurance as a concept for risk management in agriculture has emerged in India since the turn of the twentieth century and government has launched various insurance schemes in last three decades like Comprehensive Crop Insurance Scheme (CCIS), National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and Modified NAIS (MNAIS) etc. Apart from these schemes, several other pilot projects such as Seed Crop Insurance, Farm Income Insurance Scheme and Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (WBCIS) were implemented from time to time. At present, two most important schemes are functional i.e. Pradhan Mantri Fasal BimaYojna (PMFBY) and Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) are in operation. This study focused on the performance of the Restructured Weather based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) from historical and analytical perspectives and presents recommendation for future scenarios. RWBCIS scheme having two most important challenges. Firstly, weather data related issues by designing a modern scientific approach to develop high resolution secondary data and secondly, modifying the existing design of RWBCIS Products, based on sound agronomic principles.

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Drought is a climatic anomaly that can occur in all regions with vastly different climate. A persistent lack of precipitation over an extended period scaling usually a season or more results water stress that significantly impacts economic, agricultural, environmental and social aspects. For an effective monitoring of drought condition, drought indices play major role which are region specific and have limitation of applicability in different climatic condition. Hence, the present study aims to analyse the climatology and drought by two drought indices viz. Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) and standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI)) for Bundelkhand region, the most drought prone area of Central India by using 48 years (1969-2016) rainfall and temperature data. The trend analysis was performed at a significance level of 5% by using non parametric Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Sen’s slope estimator with the help of XLSTAT 2021 software. The SPI and SPEI were calculated with the SPEI R package in R-Studio software. The study revealed that i) the southwest monsoon (June to September) contributed 88.8-91.8% of total annual rainfall with coefficient of variation (CV) of 29.9-39.5%. ii) A non- significant decreasing trend in rainfall was noticed for almost all the districts during July, August and September. However, a significant (0.05 level) and decreasing trend was observed in July (4.03 mm rainfall/year) and August rainfall (4.03 mm rainfall/year) for Hamirpur. iii) The frequency of moderate drought events increased followed by severe and extreme drought events. The decreasing trends of SPI-3 and SPEI-3 were also observed which indicates more dry spells during southwest monsoon season. iv) A good correlation (r= value of 0.88 to 0.91) was observed between SPI-3 and SPEI-3 during southwest monsoon season which indicates the importance of theses indices for assessment of drought in the study region.

India Meteorological Department (IMD), Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) in collaboration with Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), State Agriculture Universities (SAUs) , Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and other organizations is rendering weather forecast based District level Agrometeorological Advisory Service (AAS) for benefits of farmers in the country under the centrally sponsored scheme ‘Atmosphere & Climate Research-Modelling Observing Systems & Services (ACROSS) ’ of MOES. AAS, popularly known as Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS) provides advance weather information along, with crop specific agromet advisories to the farming community by using state of the art instruments and technology through efficient delivering mechanism of the information which ultimately enables farmers to take appropriate actions at farm level. The various components of GKMS viz. observing weather, its monitoring and forecast; crop specific advisory bulletin generation and dissemination; outreach and feedback have been/are being digitized to support integrating all the components of information generation and action suggested linked to these information. An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based Agromet Decision Support System is developed for automation of the services provided under GKMS. This includes a dynamic framework to link the information of weather forecast, real time weather observation, crop-weather calendar etc. to translate weather forecast into actionable farm advisories for efficient farm level decision making in India. Apart from this, effort is being made to develop recent technology driven tools to estimate future yield of crops and prepare an irrigation schedule without a need of multiple parameters.