Kathmandu, October 22

Crop and livestock insurance recorded growth of 88 per cent (in value of policies sold by insurance companies) in last fiscal as compared to fiscal 2014-15 and there was encouraging progress in crop insurance, according to Insurance Board — the insurance sector regulator.

Crop and livestock insurance programmes have been given high priority by the government to safeguard farmers and the programmes are also expected to lure more people in commercial agriculture.

The government has been offering 75 per cent subsidy in premium of crop, livestock and fowl insurance since fiscal 2013-14. However, the results were not encouraging initially due to lack of information of the government’s scheme.

“But, we have witnessed encouraging results in the last two fiscal years,” said Kundan Sapkota, deputy director of the Insurance Board.

In the previous fiscal, 2015-16, Insurance Board had sought Rs 60 million from the government in addition to the allocated Rs 120 million to extend premium. According to Insurance Board, insurance companies claimed Rs 169.82 million against the subsidised premium of the insurance policies sold by the insurers worth Rs 5.99 billion under crop, fish, livestock and fowl headings.

In fiscal 2014-15, insurance companies had sold polices worth Rs 3.19 billion under the crop and livestock insurance.

Livestock insurance covered large chunk of insured amount worth Rs 4.7 billion in fiscal 2015-16, according to the Insurance Board. Similarly, the claim amount was also high for livestock as compared to others.

In fiscal 2015-16, the claim amount for livestock stood at Rs 146.08 million against the total premium of Rs 232.98 million collected by the insurance companies. The claim amount for fowl and fishery insurance is very low when compared to livestock and crop insurance.

NLG Insurance with 29.41 per cent, Siddhartha Insurance with 15.88 per cent, Nepal Insurance with 15.88 per cent, Shikhar Insurance with 9.65 per cent and Sagarmatha Insurance with 4.95 per cent secured top five positions in terms of market share of crop, livestock and fowl insurance.

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