Union Cabinet approves Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana

The Union Cabinet has approved Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, a new crop insurance scheme to boost farming sector in the country.
It is farmers’ welfare scheme that aims to reduce the premium burden on farmers and ensure early settlement of crop assurance claim for the full insured sum.
Highlights of Scheme

• Uniform premium: Farmers will pay uniform premium of 2 per cent for all Kharif crops and 1.5 percent for all Rabi crops.
• In case of annual horticultural and commercial crops, farmers will pay 5 per cent premium. These premium rates are very low.
• Government will pay balance premium to provide full insured amount to the farmers against crop loss on account of natural calamities.
• Government subsidy: There will be no upper limit subsidy given by Government even if balance premium is 90 percent.
• Capping the Premium: The provision of capping the premium rate has been removed and farmers will get claim against full sum insured without any reduction.
• It was removed as it resulted in low claims being paid to farmers and was mainly done to limit Government outgo on the premium subsidy.
• Use of technology: Government will encourage use of technology especially Smart phones and remote sensing to a great extent.
• In order to reduce the delays in claim payment to farmers, smart phones will be used to capture and upload data of crop cutting.
• To reduce the number of crop cutting experiments remote sensing will be used.

Comment
The new Crop Insurance Scheme has been formulated in line with One Nation–One Scheme theme.  It replaces existing two schemes viz. National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (MNAIS) and Modified National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (MNAIS) by removing their inherent drawbacks (shortcomings) and incorporating the best features of all previous schemes.

Month: Current Affairs - January, 2016