Cabinet approves Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana

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The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi today has approved the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana – a path breaking scheme for farmers’ welfare.

 What are the Highlights of the Scheme? 

• There will be a uniform premium of only 2% to be paid by farmers for all Kharif crops and 1.5% for all Rabi crops. In case of annual commercial and horticultural crops, the premium to be paid by farmers will be only 5%.
• The premium rates to be paid by farmers are very low and balance premium will be paid by the Government to provide full insured amount to the farmers against crop loss on account of natural calamities.
• There is no 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 was done to limit Government outgo on the premium subsidy. This capping has now been removed and farmers will get claim against full sum insured without any reduction.
• The use 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.

The new Crop Insurance Scheme is in line with One Nation – One Scheme theme.  It incorporates the best features of all previous schemes and at the same time, all previous shortcomings/weaknesses have been removed.

The current premium share for farmers can go as high as 40 percent, which is one of the main reasons that only about a tenth of India’s estimated 263 million cultivators opt for crop insurance.