Agritech start-up BharatRohan has introduced ‘Pravir Shield’, an initiative to provide parametric crop insurance to farmers in collaboration with ICICI Lombard and rural insuretech broker Gramcover.

The pilot phase of the insurance will cover paddy farmers in Barabanki of Uttar Pradesh who use BharatRohan’s drone-based crop monitoring service ‘CropAssure’, the start-up said in a statement. This will help BharatRohan’s subscriber farmers to mitigate losses due to changing weather patterns. The agritech firm aims to cover two lakh farmers by 2024.

“We have opted for parametric insurance as it provides faster pay-outs based on pre-defined parameters of adverse weather incidence such as deficit and excess rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity, which leads to losses to the farmers. The parameters are set based on the type of crop grown by the farmers as well as the historical weather pattern in the region” said Panimalar T, Associate (Growth & Strategy), leading this initiative at BharatRohan.

BharatRohan empowers its subscriber farmers by providing actionable insights through UAV/drone-based hyper-spectral imaging technology. Periodic alerts of the upcoming threats to crops like pest attacks, disease outbreaks, and nutrient deficiencies are provided to the farmers even before they are visible to the naked eye. This helps in replacing traditional guesswork with real-time scientific advisory.

Working across 30,000 acres with over 6,000 farmers in Uttar Pradesh & Rajasthan, the start-up also enables its farmers to produce residue-free commodities and sells them to large institutional buyers.

Amandeep Panwar, Co-founder & CEO at BharatRohan, said, “Indian agriculture is dependent on the monsoon, and climate change is the paramount challenge faced by Indian farmers in recent times. It affects their livelihood as the income is uncertain due to climate change and consequent crop yield volatility. Unlike conventional yield-based insurance, parametric insurance products do not envisage yield estimation before claim settlement- claims are settled based on the deviation of weather parameters from pre-defined values, the correlation between yield and weather is estimated at the time of product design,” says Sayoni Sengupta, Gramcover.

Guarding crop yield

“We partner with small and marginal farmers to enhance crop productivity and improve their income by diagnosing their fields with drone-based hyperspectral imagery. Pravir Shield is a step towards our goal to assure farmers that their crop yield is protected, and income is safeguarded. We have opted to provide parametric crop insurance to our farmers who subscribe to BharatRohan CropAssure drone-based crop advisory for every crop season. This will serve as an important tool to help them become climate resilient” says, Rishabh Choudhary, Co-founder & CTO at BharatRohan.

BharatRohan wants its partner farmers to be self-resilient and independent of private lenders for financial helps to mitigate crop damage due to natural disasters or inclement weather conditions. The start-up also encourages farmers to adopt modern and sustainable agriculture practices that increase their income and lower the carbon footprint from their cultivation practices.

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