Despite paying high premium, farmers in Gujarat are aggreived over non-payment or partial payment of crop insurance to them. This is emerging as a major issue in poll-bound Gujarat.
In Saurashtra’s Dwarka, Jamnagar, Rajkot, Amreli and Junagadh districts, there have been thousands of complaints regarding non payment of crop insurance to farmers for last year. “There has been huge delay in starting the process for filing claims and settling them. This is a major issue in the region,” Dilip Sanghani, a senior BJP leader and former agriculture minister of Gujarat told The Hindu .
In 2016, the NDA government launched the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY) and Restructured Weather-based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) to help and protect farmers against chronic crop losses due to natural calamities. As many as nine companies were roped in by the government and they together collected premiums of ₹22000 crore across the country.
“For kharif crop in 2016 in Gujarat, the state government was required to collect 77,844 crop cutting samples from across the state but as per the government’s own records, it had manpower to collect only 22,000 samples,” said Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia, who obtained details using Right to Information Act (RTI).
According to him, 55,844 crop cutting samples were collected only on papers after the kharif crop season was over last year.
Mr. Modhwadia alleges a major scam involving the state government officials and private and government owned insurance companies.
“The insurance companies paid only poultry amount as crop insurance in villages of Rajkot district. In our village, farmers got only 17 % of the total claim filed by them. The claim settlement ratio is also very low,” said Gauravsinh Jadeja, a farmer and businessman from Thebachda village near Rajkot.
In Dwarka district, not only 20 % farmers have received the insurance money for last year. “The government did not even issue a notification for payment of crop insurance as per the requirement under the PMFBY,” said Pala Ambalia, a Congress leader and farmer from Hanjrapar village near Dwarka.
He claimed that in 2015 also, as many as 15,878 farmers in Dwarka district alone were not paid crop insurance amount around ₹150 crore on the ground that the farmers had failed to submit claims on time and file the claims online.
