When a Punjab crop fails to hail, flood, frost or pest, the farmer's remedy is the girdawari, the crop inspection entry made by the patwari, and the compensation the state announces per acre for the damage recorded.
The rates are low relative to the cost of production and the process is slow. Payment can take a season or more.
The other thing that functions as cover is the loan waiver, announced at intervals and applied to categories of borrower rather than to categories of loss. It arrives years after the failure it answers, it goes to whoever had institutional debt on a qualifying date, and it does nothing at all for a farmer whose money came from an arhtiya.
Punjab's farmers are in practice insured by the minimum support price, which removes price risk, and not against yield risk at all.
That is why a hailstorm in March is a household crisis and why it feeds directly into the debt figures.
The single measure that would reduce Punjab's farm distress fastest is a yield insurance that pays quickly, and it does not exist.
The national crop insurance scheme has never been implemented in Punjab. The state has stayed out of it since it began, on the argument that the premium structure does not suit its cropping.
A girdawari entry can be challenged and re-inspected and the appeal runs up the revenue chain. That takes months. The farmer needs money to sow the next crop in weeks, and that gap between the two clocks is where the borrowing happens.
The assessment is done by the patwari and the rate is political. Neither is insurance, and the gap is why one bad season turns straight into debt.