BJP State President & Jammu West MLA Sat Sharma CA and former Deputy Chief Minister & party senior leader Dr. Nirmal Singh, while addressing a joint press conference at party headquarter, said that the farmers have got new year gift from the BJP-led NDA government under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which will indeed prove to be of great benefit to the farming community.
Both, Sat Sharma and Dr. Nirmal Singh, while terming the Union Cabinet’s approval to “Prime Minister Fasal Bima Yojana” as path breaking scheme for farmers’ welfare, said that it is new year’s gift to the farmers by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Elaborating the scheme, Sat and Dr. Singh said that there will be a uniform insurance premium of only 2% to be paid by farmers for all Kharif crops and 1.5% for all Rabi crops. In case of annual commercial and horticultural crops, the premium to be paid by farmers will be only 5%. The premium rates to be paid by farmers are very low and balance premium will be paid by the Government to provide full insured amount to the farmers against crop loss on account of natural calamities. They said that one very important aspect of this scheme is that there is no upper limit on Government subsidy. Even if balance premium is 90% it will be borne by the Government.
Speaking on past provisions, they said that earlier, there was a provision of capping the premium rate, which resulted in low claims being paid to farmers. This capping was done to limit Government outgo on the premium subsidy. This capping has now been removed and farmers will get claim against full sum insured without any reduction.
“Not only this, the new scheme has stressed on the use of technology to a great extent, wherein Smart phones will be used to capture and upload data of crop cutting to reduce the delays in claim payment to farmers and Remote sensing will be used to reduce the number of crop cutting experiments” said Sat Sharma and Dr. Nirmal Singh adding that this scheme will improve the economic position of the farmers besides bringing them out of the fear of losses arising due to crop damage.
