Farmers are still unaware of the details of the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojana even as the government and insurers are trying to increasing the penetration in the non-loanee segment, said climate risk management firm WRMS.
However, in many states, high satisfaction has been seen among the enrolled farmers and reasons for the same were proper implementation in terms of assistance to farmers, involvement of the insurance company and the high percentage of insured farmers receiving payouts, it said.
The PMFBY, launched in 2016, is the most important tool today to insure agriculture against climate and other risks.
The scheme which is an improvement over the previous agri insurance schemes not only provides subsidised insurance to the loanee farmers but also offers it to non-loanee farmers.
“In a recent survey done in eight states (Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland, Bihar and Maharashtra) by BASIX, it was found that only 28.7 per cent of the sampled farmers are aware about PMFBY,” Weather Risk Management Services Pvt Ltd (WRMS) said.
Per the survey’s findings, farmers complain that the process for enrolment as non-loanee farmers is difficult. They have to obtain sowing certificates and land records from the local revenue department, which is time consuming.
Further, bank branches and customer service centres are not always available for enrolment as they are pre-occupied with other works, it showed.
“Farmers are not told why they have received or not received claims and what is the basis for the claim calculations,” it noted.
According to the survey, 40.8 per cent gathered information from formal sources such as the agriculture department, insurance companies or customer service centres and rest were informed by specific channels creating awareness.
From those who were aware of the scheme only 12.9 per cent could get their crop insured of which 77 per cent were linked to loan.
“41.3 per cent of the farmers cited lack of necessary documents as the major challenge to get insurance and the other challenges were small land holdings (21.4 per cent), lack of assistance from government officials (26 per cent) and inefficiency of online systems (17.3 per cent),” the WRMS said about the findings of the survey.
