HYDERABAD: Agriculture Minister S Niranjan Reddy stating in the Assembly how crop insurance policies have failed to benefit farmers in the past and that there’s a need for farmer-centric insurance schemes has put the emerging agri-insure tech industry in focus.
With the State government signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a period of two years with Wingsure recently, all eyes are on what the company plans to do differently, at a time when farmers have become apprehensive about crop insurance schemes.
“One of the major reasons for this trust-deficit is that farmers were never made a part of the damage assessment process. We want to involve the farmer in every step of the process, including damage assessment. In fact, we want the farmer himself/herself do it, which would not only speed up the claims process, but would also make it transparent,” says Abi Basu, Founder of Wingsure, an insuretech venture spun out of SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute).
Wingsure is currently at the conception stage of their project’s life-cycle, wherein they are partnering with insurance firms, brokerage partners, PJTSAU, ITE&C department, agriculture department, NGOs, agricultural service partners and also farmers, to study all aspects of what farmers need and where they need technological interventions.
The company is building an android application which can be used both for distributing their crop insurance products and to provide advisory services to farmers — all on a single platform built using emerging technologies like AI, augmented reality and machine learning.
“Soil regeneration, regenerative agricultural practices and agricultural landscape design form the main components of our objective to promote climate resilient practices while mitigating risk,” Abi told Express.