Yavatmal's Cotton Farmers Battle Survey Errors

thenewsdirt
1 day ago
8 min read

In the cotton fields of Yavatmal district, a crisis unfolds not from the sky but from the bureaucratic machinery meant to protect farmers.

Heavy rainfall in August 2025 devastated over 1,64,932 hectares of farmland across the district, destroying standing crops and leaving families desperate for relief.

However, the promised compensation process has become mired in a different kind of disaster, one born from faulty survey procedures and methodological failures that continue to deny farmers appropriate financial assistance months after damage assessments were supposed to have been completed.

Cotton cultivators and other affected farmers now find themselves caught in a familiar pattern, waiting for corrections to crop-loss surveys that contain errors concerning both land measurements and crop valuations, corrections that have repeatedly been promised but are yet to materialise.

The machinery of relief in Maharashtra operates through a procedure known locally as the panchnama, a formal field survey in which trained personnel assess the extent of crop damage on individual farms.

Once completed, this panchnama determines which farmers qualify for compensation and how much they should receive.

For farmers in Yavatmal, the panchnama process has become a source of deep frustration rather than hope. The surveys, conducted with apparent haste in the months following natural disasters, frequently contain significant measurement errors that systematically reduce the amount of compensation available to affected cultivators.

These errors typically involve the underestimation of actual cotton-growing areas, a problem that has persisted across multiple crop seasons and continues to affect farming communities across Vidarbha.

Survey Practices and Methodological Problems

One particular source of contention involves the treatment of intercropped areas within cotton fields.

Farmers in Vidarbha have long practised intercropping, a technique where legumes such as moong (green gram) and udid (black gram) are grown in alternating rows between cotton plants.

Agronomic experts recommend this approach specifically because it helps control pest infestations naturally, reducing the need for excessive pesticide use on the primary cotton crop.

However, when panchnama teams visit fields to conduct damage assessments, many of them deduct the intercropped areas from the total cotton cultivation measurement. This deduction occurs even though the intercropped varieties exist within cotton fields and serve an essential pest management function.

As a result, the surveyed cotton area on official records falls far short of the actual area under cultivation, leading directly to reduced compensation payments. A farmer from Takali Khureshi village explained that when intercropped intermediate rows were deducted from the total surveyed area, half of his cotton cropped land was simply erased from the official assessment.

This practice of excluding intercropped areas from the panchnama has generated particular anger among the farming community because it penalises farmers for following recommended agricultural practices.

The compensation framework itself operates on a per-hectare basis with strict upper limits. For non-irrigated crops, the standard compensation ranges between ₹8,500 and ₹13,600 per hectare, depending on which government resolution was in effect at the time of the survey. For irrigated farmland, the compensation reaches ₹17,000 to ₹27,000 per hectare.

These amounts, however, bear little relationship to the actual costs farmers incur in cotton cultivation. When cotton yields approximately ten quintals per acre, and each quintal fetches a price at or below what compensation provides per hectare, the financial gap becomes catastrophic.

A farmer from Goregaon Budruk calculated that the ₹6,800 per hectare compensation translates to roughly ₹2,720 per acre, which is less than the market price of a single quintal of cotton. Yet the same acre, when hit by pest damage, typically loses four quintals of output. The mathematics of relief, therefore, fails to match the mathematics of actual agricultural loss.

The process of survey correction has proven extraordinarily slow and opaque. Despite panchnama surveys being formally completed months or even years ago in many cases, farmers report that revised assessments reflecting actual land areas under cultivation remain pending.

A farmer from Sukli village in Arni taluka received a compensation payment of just ₹6,900 deposited into his bank account by the administration for crop losses caused by excessive August rainfall.

Rather than accept what he considered grossly insufficient compensation, the farmer submitted a demand draft returning the entire amount to the government through the tehsildar's office. In his communication, he highlighted that the losses he had suffered from the heavy rains were far more extensive than the minimal compensation offered.

He further noted that such a small amount provided no meaningful support for recovery and reconstruction. His action, dramatic as it was, represented a wider sentiment among Yavatmal's farming population: that the official compensation system has become fundamentally broken, offering pittance in place of genuine relief.

Policy Limits, Administrative Delays and Digital Bottlenecks

Technical complications have further stalled the correction process. In October 2025, reports indicated that panchnama procedures had been halted across multiple districts in Maharashtra, including parts of Yavatmal.

The stoppage occurred because the state government had initially raised the hectare limit for compensation eligibility from two hectares to three hectares as a special measure during the 2025 monsoon crisis.

However, this expansion subsequently proved controversial. By May 2025, a new administration reversed the policy, returning the limit to two hectares per farmer. '

This policy reversal created administrative paralysis. Officials responsible for conducting panchnama surveys faced a dilemma, if they were to increase the permitted hectare limit, they would need to conduct entirely fresh surveys to determine which additional farmers qualified under the new three-hectare threshold.

The administrative burden of redoing these surveys, combined with uncertainty about which policy would ultimately prevail, led officials to simply pause the panchnama process. As a result, approximately 26 districts across Maharashtra had incomplete panchnama reports by October 2025, with Yavatmal among the affected areas. The consequence for cotton farmers has been indefinite waiting for correction and revised compensation calculations.

The broader compensation environment across Vidarbha reveals a pattern of delayed payments even after surveys have been formally completed.

A December 2023 report documented instances where crop-loss surveys had been completed months earlier, yet the corresponding relief payments had not reached affected farmers. Subsequent investigations found that bureaucratic procedures, combined with election-year political considerations, had contributed to these delays.

In one documented case, the state cabinet approved a relief package for affected citrus growers in November 2023, but no funds were actually released before the elections took place. Only after public protests and demonstrations demanding ₹50,000 per hectare in compensation did officials resume processing the payments.

The pattern suggests that even when surveys are eventually corrected and compensation calculated, the actual transfer of funds to farmers' bank accounts depends on a range of administrative and political factors that extend far beyond the technical accuracy of the assessment process.

Administrative confusion has also contributed to delays in reaching farmers with corrected assessments.

In Wardha district, which falls within the broader Vidarbha region, approximately 15,330 farmers had compensation amounts totalling ₹13.31 crore stuck in the system as of late December 2025, pending completion of e-KYC (electronic Know Your Customer) authentication procedures. While these farmers had already been identified in completed panchnama surveys and compensation amounts calculated, the administrative requirement for digital verification created an additional bottleneck.

The state administration issued warnings that compensation would be withheld until the e-KYC process was completed, placing the burden on individual farmers to navigate a complex digital verification procedure to access funds that had already been officially allocated to them. This situation has been replicated in various forms across Yavatmal and other cotton-growing districts, where farmers must clear multiple bureaucratic hurdles even after the panchnama has been theoretically concluded.

The specific issue of survey methodology errors in cotton cultivation extends back several crop seasons in Yavatmal. Earlier reports from 2018 documented how farmers had raised formal objections to panchnama procedures that they considered fundamentally flawed.

Farmers in Balapur and Akot talukas noted that the agriculture department had not received formal complaints regarding the panchnama process, seemingly dismissing farmer concerns as unofficial grievances rather than systemic problems.

Yet when farmers presented evidence that the surveys had omitted significant portions of their cotton cultivation, particularly intercropped areas, the department maintained that the survey procedures had been conducted according to standard protocols. This defensive stance, combined with the absence of a mechanism to formally lodge complaints about panchnama accuracy, has perpetuated the problem.

Farmers have no clear avenue to challenge a completed survey, and any corrections depend on ad hoc administrative decisions rather than established procedures.

The compensation cap at two hectares adds another layer of inadequacy. For cotton farmers in Yavatmal who typically operate on smallholdings of three to five hectares, the two-hectare limit means that losses on any additional land simply go uncompensated.

A farmer owning three hectares of cotton would receive compensation for only two hectares worth of loss, regardless of actual damage across all three hectares.

This structural limitation systematically disadvantages medium-scale operators while creating perverse incentives for farmers to misrepresent their holdings or to seek informal compensation mechanisms outside the official system.

Combined with the underestimation of land area through faulty panchnama procedures, many cotton farmers effectively receive compensation for less than half their actual losses.

Continuing Impact on Farmers and Their Future Seasons

The delay in corrections has cascading impacts on farming operations. When promised relief does not arrive in a timely manner, farmers face acute shortages of cash for purchasing seeds, fertilisers, and labour for the next planting season.

Many cotton growers in Yavatmal have responded by reducing their cultivated area or switching to lower-yielding alternative crops due to lack of funds for inputs.

In Vidarbha, where irrigation infrastructure remains limited, the timing of financial relief is often the difference between farmers being able to plant on schedule and leaving land fallow entirely. A farmer waiting for corrected survey assessments and revised compensation cannot plan the next season with certainty, cannot arrange credit without knowledge of incoming funds, and cannot make rational agricultural decisions in the face of bureaucratic uncertainty.

The state government has issued assurances that the panchnama process will be accelerated and completed without further delay. In September 2025, the Chief Minister addressed Yavatmal farmers directly, pledging that assistance for damaged crops, homes, and lost livestock would be deposited directly into farmers' bank accounts as soon as official damage assessments were finalised.

Agriculture Ministry officials have similarly promised that compensation would be processed without delay once panchnama reports were received by their offices. However, such assurances have been offered repeatedly over multiple years, yet the fundamental problems with survey accuracy and administrative delays persist.

Farmers in Yavatmal have grown skeptical of verbal promises and now demand concrete timelines and transparent procedures for both conducting corrected surveys and releasing compensation funds.

The situation in Yavatmal district reflects broader challenges with the relief mechanism across cotton-growing regions in Vidarbha. The region cultivates cotton on approximately five lakh hectares of land according to recent estimates, and the vast majority of that cultivation is still vulnerable to the kinds of methodological errors that have plagued the panchnama process.

As long as survey procedures continue to underestimate actual cotton cultivation, as long as intercropping practices are penalised through deductions in official area calculations, and as long as compensation limits remain far below actual losses, the corrective mechanism remains fundamentally inadequate.

Cotton farmers in Yavatmal are waiting for a system that accurately measures their losses and provides compensation proportionate to actual damage.

That wait, which has now extended across multiple seasons and multiple policy changes, continues to define the relationship between the farming community and the administrative apparatus supposed to protect their interests.