Odisha includes 7 crops under PMFBY insurance for kharif, 2017

Odisha government today decided to include seven major crops - paddy, groundnut, cotton, turmeric, ginger, red-gram (arhar) and maize - under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) for the kharif season, 2017.
This was decided at the State Level Coordination (SLC) Committee meeting on Crop Insurance held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary A P Padhi. Last year, five types of crops - paddy, groundnut, cotton, ginger and turmeric - were covered under the PMFBY.
PMFBY was implemented in Odisha during kharif 2016 season. A total number of 17.63 lakh farmers cultivating around 12.57 lakh hectare were brought into the insurance fold, official sources said adding that a total sum of Rs 68.88 crore was insured for the farmers.

Around Rs 530 crore was paid as premium to the insurance companies. During this season around Rs 422 crore of claim was raised by the farmers from all 30 districts that were divided to 5 clusters for the purposes of crop insurance.
As per earlier decisions, tender has already been called from the insurance companies. The tenders are in the process of scrutiny and examination, said Manoj Ahuja, the secretary of agriculture and cooperation department.
Reviewing the progress, Padhi directed the department to enhance the security net by bringing in more and more non- loanee farmers to the fold of crop insurance. Representatives of the insurance companies, present in the meeting, were asked to disburse the insured sum to the farmers within 15 days of the final crop cutting report.

Padhi emphasised that since the crop cutting experiment was done through application of remote sensing and mobile apps, there should be no confusion in expediting settling the claims. Odisha is a leading state in application of remote sensing and mobile apps in crop cutting experiment.
This was started from Kharif, 2016 with 33,000 live samples collected from various parts of the state.