Does Crop Insurance Promote Nutrition and Good Health Among Women and Children in the Agrarian Households of India?

Abstract

AbstractImproving maternal and child health is one of the top objectives of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The use of maternal services can help improve both maternal and child health. However, the factors influencing such utilizations are complex and can be determined by several factors. This paper aims to examine the role of crop insurance on health-seeking behaviour among women of reproductive age. We also examine the nutritional outcome of children below 5 years. We use two nationally representative data sets and combine them using district as the common identification level. To capture the health-seeking behaviour, we use several measures of antenatal care use, safe delivery, and postnatal care as outcome variables. We use multilevel regression to find that women in districts with higher crop insurance adoption seek more antenatal care than their counterparts with lower crop insurance adoption. Further, we observe that these groups of women are more likely to opt for institutional delivery and receive postnatal care in a private facility. Apart from secondary data analysis, we also conduct a pilot survey in the two districts of Bihar. Using a sample size of 400 households, we find that households who are beneficiaries of the Government of India’s recently launched income support programme (PM-Kisan Samman Niddhi Yojna) report a greater level of food security. Women from these households seek higher early antenatal care. Finally, children from the benefited households received higher immediate postnatal care. Therefore our finding suggests that crop insurance and income support programmes for the farmers not only provide a hedge against crop loss by ensuring some degree of certainty and ensuring income smoothing but also positively impact food security for the households, improve healthcare-seeking practices by women in their reproductive age and improves child nutritional outcomes.