UNDP India joins hands with Absolute to further sustainable agriculture practices under PMYBY
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Absolute®, a bioscience company, on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen the government of India’s flagship Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) and enhance the resilience of the farmers. India faces challenges such as weather fluctuations, pest attacks, erratic rainfall, and humidity affecting agricultural produce.
These factors lead to lower yields and income for farmers each year. From 2015 to 2021, India lost 33.9 million hectares of cropped area due to floods and excess rains and 35 million hectares due to drought.
PMFBY, or Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme, offers risk protection by providing financial support to farmers suffering crop loss or damage arising out of these unforeseen events, thus stabilising their income, encouraging them to adopt innovative and modern agricultural practices and ensuring the flow of credit to the agriculture sector for food security, crop diversification and enhancing growth and competitiveness of agriculture sector. The partnership between UNDP India and Absolute® aims to enhance the implementation of the PMFBY and the Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) by building technical capabilities of the scheme and digitalising service delivery of crop insurance and agricultural credit processes to increase reach and uptake of the schemes.
It will also promote credit profiling of farmers, agri-entrepreneurs, and Farmer Producers Organizations (FPOs), for accurate crop loss assessment and risk evaluation to mobilize agriculture financing. UNDP and Absolute® will also use advanced technology and data-driven solutions to facilitate farmland identification and enhance farm monitoring, R&D,
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