Mint Primer: A tech solution to crop insurance woes?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The government has cleared a revamped crop insurance scheme and additional funds to deploy new technology like remote sensing and automatic weather stations. This is expected to improve transparency and claim settlement.
Will this help protect farmers? Mint explores. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) was launched in 2016 to protect farmer incomes from weather shocks. On Wednesday, the Cabinet approved the continuation of PMFBY with an outlay of ₹69,516 crore for the five years to 2025-26.
For large-scale technology diffusion, it approved a fund with a corpus of ₹825 crore. Also read | Can India turn into a global hub for data centres? The Centre expects technology adoption to help usher in transparency and hasten claim settlement, a major pain point for farmers. Under PMFBY, farmers pay 2% of the insurance premium for kharif crops and 1.5% for rabi crops.
The rest is shared by the Centre and state governments. The Yield Estimation System Using Technology, or YES-TECH, will deploy satellite-based remote sensing to assess crop yields and damage. The new tech will be given 30% weightage while calculating yields.
The other intervention is to deploy automatic weather stations and rain gauges to collect hyper-local weather data at the block and panchayat levels. This will help in faster assessment of adverse weather and related damage to crops. Weather shocks like hailstorms and excess rainfall are often localized events, and a dense network of weather stations can quickly assess the extent of losses to farmers.
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