Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana
The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister, Mr.
Narendra Modi approved the New Crop Insurance Scheme, ‘Pradhan Mantri Fasal
Bima Yojana’ (Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme) to boost the agricultural
sector. The theme of the Scheme is One
Nation – One Scheme. In this, all shortcomings and weaknesses of all
previous schemes were removed and incorporated with the best features of all
schemes.
Highlights of the scheme are:
· Farmers will pay a uniform
premium of only 2 percent for all Kharif crops and 1.5% for all Rabi crops.
· In case of annual commercial
and horticultural crops, farmers will pay a premium of only 5 percent. The
balance premium, after farmers paying the premium at very low rate, will be
paid by the Government to provide full insured amount to the farmers against
crop loss on account of natural calamities.
· There will not be any upper
limit on Government subsidy. Even if balance premium is 90%, it will be borne
by the Government.
· Earlier, there was a provision
of capping the premium rate which resulted in low claims being paid to farmers.
This capping limited the Government outgo on the premium subsidy. Now, this
capping was removed and farmers will get full sum insured without any reduction
against their claim.
· The usage of technology will
be encouraged to a great extent. Smart phones will be used to capture and
upload data of crop cutting to reduce the delays in claim payment to farmers.
Remote sensing will be used to reduce the number of crop cutting experiments.
What is the scheme
all about?
·
The scheme
provides agricultural insurance for crops against crop loss and failure.
·
It will charge a
uniform premium of two per cent of the sum insured from farmers for all kharif
crops and 1.5 per cent for rabi crops.
·
For horticulture
crops, the annual premium will be five per cent of the sum insured.
·
The balance
premium would be paid by the government to the insurance companies.
·
This would be
shared equally by the Centre and state governments.
·
The scheme has
the lowest premium, it entails easy usage of technology like mobile phone,
quick assessment of damage and disbursement within a time-frame.
·
For the Centre,
there would be no upper limit on the subsidy and even if the balance premium is
90 per cent, it would provide for the same.
·
This also means
if a state government does not fulfil its commitment of 50 per cent subsidy
sharing, the Centre would step in but not allow the scheme to fail.
·
Till now, the
average premium for all food grain crops was as high as 15 per cent, while for
horticulture crops, it was even higher.
·
However the
premium rates in the new scheme would as low as 2% for kharif crops, 1.5% for
rabi crops and 5% for horticultural crops.
Under
the earlier schemes, according to rules, farmers’ insurance claims have to be
settled within 45 days of the risk assessment. However, often, claims are not
attended to even after six months, which is a major reason why farmers don’t
for crop insurance.
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