Crop insurance scam worth crores in Shajapur

INDORE: A scam worth crores has come to fore in Shajapur district, where a gang with help of a local agriculture cooperative society used to pay extra premium by showing additional farm land on papers and receive additional amount of claims of damaged agriculture produce.

The officials concerned involved in the fraudulent have also caused loss to some actual farmers by not submitting their premium amount of two years.

Acting on some complaints of local villagers related to said scam, Shajapur collector Dinesh Jain had a few weeks ago constituted a committee to examine alleged irregularities as part of one Primary Agriculture Cooperative Society – Nandini Society, which is authorized to do insurance of crops of its members (farmers) of Pratappura, Kankadkheda and Anandikhedi Gram Panchayat of Kalapipal Tehsil.

What came to fore was very surprising as the society’s officials allegedly benefited some farmers of over Rs 1 crore by paying extra premium of their actual land, they also caused loss to over 700 farmers by around Rs 3.5 Ccore by not/less submitting premium of their crop insurance.

The agriculture cooperative societies are formed for three years and assigned different works including that carry out insurance of the crops, notified by the government, of its members (farmers). For Kharif and Rabi crops, 2 and 1.5 percent of the insurance amount is respectively paid as the premium i.e. Rs 960/ hectare for Soyabean crops, Rs 720/hectare for wheat and Rs 525/ hectare for Gram crop.

The agriculture cooperative societies take the base of NCL register along with the revenue records of the agriculture land to identify actual areas to do the crop insurance for. In case of Nandini Society, the officials only referred to NCL register, which had many mismatches than the actual agriculture lands as registered in the revenue records.