looking to spread crop insurance coverage to the farmers along with lessening their hassles coming in the way at the time of claiming damage, the Government has completely slammed the doors on the faces of private companies this time around. Informed sources in the Cooperative Department said that notification for the kharif seasons 2015-16 had been made that also fixed dates for the farmers to apply for the crop coverage.
“The Department has issued notification regarding the Centre’s scheme known now as Modified National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (MNAIS) last week. September 30 is the last date for loanee farmers who have to be covered under insurance compulsorily. No private insurance company has been notified this time,” said a senior official.
Insurance majors such as Bajaj Allianz, IFFCO-Tokio and ICICI-lombard etc are empanelled agencies and have been providing crop insurance coverage in Jharkhand along with public sector player Agriculture Insurance Corporation of India limited (AIC) since the Centre had in 2010 replaced NAIS with MNAIS. Interestingly, negligible number of farmers had come into the kitty of the Government owned-company in 2014.
“This would have been one of the reasons (behind not permitting private players). We started area approach in April itself for kharif insurance. For non-loanee farmers, the due date has been kept as July 31. Sum insured would be decided based on standing crop and damage would be assessed based on data collected on standing crop by March 31, 2016,” said Hemant Kumar Panda, Regional Manager of AIC.
Sum insured is broadly equivalent to the ‘cost of cultivation’ and is pre-declared based on the standing drop. Sum insured for individual farmer will be product of farmer’s declared ‘area under cultivation’ (in hectare) for that notified crop and sum insured per hectare, as mentioned in notification. The Government in its notification has also declared the crops that would be given insurance cover for the kharif 2015 season. “This time in Jharkhand it has been decided to cover three produces and these are of paddy, maize and black gram. We hope that number of farmers coming under coverage would go up considering the forecast of below normal monsoon this time,” said Panda.
Figures suggest that only 1.75 lakh farmers in 2013 across all 24 districts had opted for kharif crop insurance - mainly for paddy - whereas it was better in 2012 with 3.71 lakh. Historically the State has been a good performer in terms of agriculture insurance coverage and had topped amongst the States in 2009 with as many as 13.09 lakh farmers opting for crop cover. However, performance in Rabi season has not been up to the mark. Since 2010-11 and up to 2012-13 only 41676 farmers were insured covering 37659 hectares of land and sum insured Rs 86.13 crore. Moreover, number of farmers benefited from the scheme was meager 96!