Bangla Shashya Bima: State pushes to fast-track process to handover insurance

KOLKATA: The state Agriculture department has asked the Agriculture Insurance Company of India (AIC) for fast-tracking the process of handover of the insurance amount to farmers under the Bangla Shashya Bima programme.

The move comes with paddy cultivation in some districts getting affected this Kharif season, due to inadequate rainfall.

Birbhum, Purulia, Murshidabad and West Burdwan are the districts that have mostly suffered due to a dearth of rainfall. According to data available with the state Agriculture department, Birbhum has seen transplantation of paddy in 178800 hectares of land against a target of 294000, Purulia has accounted for transplantation on 240531 hectares against a target of 339600, Murshidabad has covered 131925 against a target of 188000 while West Burdwan has seen 17605 hectares land under transplantation against a target of 41100 hectares.

The overall picture of transplantation is not so bad with 90 per cent of the target being achieved. The coverage of Kharif paddy has spread across 38.52 lakh hectares of land, the target being 42.81 lakh hectares. During the corresponding period last year, the growth was on 42.16 lakh hectares. The state Agriculture department has provided seeds worth Rs 10 crore for alternative farming to the farmers. Moong Korai popularly known as 'tarka dal' and mustard seeds have been handed over for cultivation, state Agriculture minister Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay said.

"Over 61 lakh applications of Bangla Shasya Bima have been received by us and the processing is under progress," Santu Das, regional manager of Kolkata office of AIC said. The operational jurisdiction of this office is Bengal, Tripura and Sikkim. The insurance is provided on the basis of remote sensing satellite data acquisition technology of the National Remote Sensing Centre of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that was introduced during the 2020 Kharif season. A joint inspection is carried out by officials of the Agriculture department and AIC after the satellite imaging and accordingly the insurance amount is disbursed.

The crop insurance scheme is free for the farmers as the state government pays the entire premium. The insurance scheme covers losses suffered during planting cultivation, during the period of post-cutting when crops are lying in the field and for adverse

weather conditions.