Business Standard / New Delhi October 17, 2008, 0:31 IST The non-clearance of insurance claims can render any risk mitigation product worthless. It is worse when the victims are hapless farmers who, having lost their crops, are deprived of compensation despite having insurance cover under the government-supported National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NAIS). Unpaid insurance claims are reckoned to have mounted to over Rs 920 crore, owing largely to the failure of state governments to put in their share of the money for running the scheme. This is not the only problem with NAIS, which was evolved after decades of experimentation with over half-a-dozen models of farm insurance products since the 1980s. As the findings of some studies, including the National Sample Survey, have revealed, a large proportion of farmers are either unaware of the available risk management scheme, or are not opting for it because it offers little by way of gain. Inappropriate procedures for assessing crop yield in order to determine the compensation that has to be paid, invariably leave the farmers dismayed. Several other irksome issues have also remained unaddressed, including those concerning the unit area for the operation of the scheme, benchmarks for assessing crop losses, the extent of risk coverage and the amount of premium to be charged. The fundamental problem with all the agricultural insurance models that have been tried out and discarded till now, is the lack of economic viability despite the government