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The Central Government to Unveil New Crop Insurance Scheme

The central government is going to launch a new Farm Crop Insurance Scheme by early 2016 which thus could indicate the new elected government’s maiden move towards the agrarian problem.

The agricultural minister Mr. Radha Mohan Singh said that this new scheme will be more farmer friendly as the government plans to use technologies like drones and satellites to identify the damages happen to crops. The usual delay in clearing pay for the crop losses materializes in farmer destruction. This new scheme intends to ensure that compensation for the crop losses is paid on time.

Crop insurance in India at present is so high that only about a 10th of an estimated 263 million farmers only opt for this. The main aim of this scheme is to lower the premium rates that the farmers have to pay for crop insurance up to 40%. At the same time it plans to extend scope and coverage of crops.

The developed countries like the USA use extensive digital technology to evaluate crop losses during disasters but India still opts for more traditional methods which include officials from land record offices travelling to villages to examine the damages.  In this traditional method, crop insurance is determined by the level of damages that has been acquired by the farmers although the farmers use high quality seeds, fertilizers and others. This typically means that the farmers are more prone to natural disaster facing huge loses. This new scheme can solve this problem as well as it plans to let farmers get the immediate benefit of a minimum 25% in case of crop losses due to any natural disaster.

Estimation of crop yielding is difficult so to help improve it and to settle crop insurance claim, the Ministry of Agriculture has launched a pilot study to map farmland using space and geo-spatial technology. Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) is in charge of the pilot project of the initiative called KISAN+ in 4 districts of Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra during kharif 2015 season and 8 districts in the same states during 2015-16 rabi season. This project plans to use multi-parameter testing for block level estimation for yield.

Source: Reuters, ET

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