Agriculture Insurance: Insurance Cover to Chilli Crop in this Season

The district administration has brought some cheers to the Chilli growing farmers, in this season allowing them to insure their crops, after the more than one lakh paddy cultivating farmers became crestfallen, losing their crops following failure of north east monsoon.

When the district administration announced that they could insure their crops on the lines of their paddy cultivating counterparts, farmers who had taken up chilli cultivation in about 15,000 hectares were keeping their fingers crossed following the failure of the monsoon.

Collector S. Natarajan took up the issue with the authorities, after which, to provide insurance cover to the chilli growing farmers the State government and the Agriculture Insurance Company of India gave consent, after finding that the chilli growing farmers faced difficulties in insuring their crop.

Mr. Natarajan has said, “We received orders from the Government to this effect on Thursday and asked the farmers to pay the premium in the Primary Agriculture Cooperative Credit Societies (PACCS) after completing the formalities.”

He said that, under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) scheme, farmers have been asked to pay premium of Rs. 1,000 per acre for total insurance cover of Rs. 20,000 per acre.

S. Tamil Vendhan, Deputy Director of Horticulture has informed that, earlier, chilli growing farmers were allowed to insure their crops only in certain pockets and this was the first time, the facility has been extended to farmers throughout the district.

In this season, farmers have cultivated chilli in 15,022 hectares. He also informed, "we expect 12,000 to 15,000 farmers to avail the benefits by insuring their crops.”

The ‘Ramnad Mundu’ variety have cultivated by about 90% of the farmers, the remaining farmers have cultivated the ‘Samba’ species and the district produced an average 37,500 tonnes of chillies a year.

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/