IT minister KT Rama Rao urged Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) chairman TS Vijayan to consider the survey number as a unit and not village or mandal as a unit for the crop insurance scheme.
Rama Rao called on Vijayan at the IRDA office here on Wednesday. He wanted the IRDA chairman to ensure that the crop insurance scheme should be implemented with farmer’s survey number as a unit. As the IRDA had control over all the insurance schemes, it should take the initiative and see that survey number as a unit for crop insurance scheme.
Rama Rao explained to the IRDA chairman that one lakh farmers were taking crop loans every year in the state. The farmers were paying insurance premium at the time of taking crop loans, but the farmers were not getting insurance amount when their crop was lost, Rama Rao said.
Vijayan told Rama Rao that insurance companies were facing some problems in assessing the crop damage. But, he agreed that the survey number as a unit should be taken for crop insurance scheme.
Responding to this, Rama Rao said that he would arrange the services of community coordinators working in rural development department for assessing farmer-wise crop damage. The community coordinators would send information about the cropped area of each farmer through mobile monitoring system, which were currently used by the coordinators.
For further discussions on this, Rama Rao has decided to hold a meeting with insurance companies extending crop loan insurance on July 11 at the Secretariat. IRDA representatives too would attend the meeting.
The minister further said the state government was setting up an exclusive Data Analytics Park, which would be helpful to insurance sector.
Source: The New Indian Express