Union Cabinet approved Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana to boost the farming sector

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 13 January 2016 approved the New Crop Insurance Scheme,‘Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana’ 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.

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