India Needs Technological Breakthrough To Make Crop Insurance Scheme A Success

Ashish Kumar Bhutani, CEO, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) and Joint Secretary (Credit), Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare has said that the country needs a technological breakthrough to make crop insurance scheme a success in India, according to a latest update from FICCI. Speaking at the 'National Conference on Risk Mitigation through Tech Innovations in Agri Insurance', organised by FICCI, Bhutani said that despite spending Rs 30,000 crore on PMFBY, it was getting negative publicity as large number of farmers have complained about non-payment of claims due to the use of a primitive technology. Crop cutting experiments (CCEs) which forms the basis of calculation of yields, computation of losses and finally computation of claims, is vulnerable to manipulations, seen in many states, and also the process of random sampling of farming plots, at times, results in benefits not reaching the farmers hit with calamity, Bhutani said.

Farm level assessment of the yields without a technology breakthrough is a logistic nightmare and the cost of implementing a farm level insurance in the country would be more than the subsidy government is providing today, he added. For better implementation, the government is experimenting with weather based crop insurance scheme (WBCIS) which has its own challenges mainly because of the way the term sheets have been designed. As for the lack of density of automatic weather stations in the country for executing WBCIS, satellite based data at lower level can supplement in its implementation, he said further.

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