The AI-driven crop-insurance company’s founder and CEO Avi Basu says agri insurance has been an ‘important learning ground’.
AI-driven crop-insurance technology company Wingsure, a spinout of the Stanford Research Institute, is looking to help farmers to avail of credit from partner banks for easier payment of premiums, its founder and CEO Avi Basu said.
“Maybe we will have combined capabilities, as payment of premium is always going to be an issue. We are trying to see if there can be easier payment of premium,” said the founder and CEO of the company, which has covered over 0.5 million farmers.
Insurance coverage in India is “pretty low”, with less than 30 per cent of the farmers being covered. “Close to 150 million farmers need to get covered; so that is an issue,” said Basu, whose firm provides insurance cover for 18 crops in the country on its platform, its founder and CEO Avi Basu said.
Wingsure, a deep tech firm based in the US and India, has worked on agri insurance and crop assessment problems across several States, and it has applied technology for its programmes involving “hundreds of thousands of farmers”.
Project with Coffee Board
India has been an important learning ground for the insurance company. It started with the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) and crop insurance.
“One of our first projects in India was with the Coffee Board of India and the Coorg (Kodagu) Association. It was sponsored in partnership with WhatsApp, because at that time we were really entertaining the idea of using WhatsApp as the presentation layer,” he told businessline in an online interaction.
Tech opportunities
“I think this year, specifically, PMFBY is a remarkable programme in terms of ambition and trying to protect farmers at an enormous scale. The issues that we have seen specifically this year and what I hear also from our insurer friends and everybody else is that it’s not necessarily that fewer people are getting covered, but there is a tension between the economics of doing the insurance and the premium at sort of very aggressive rates while trying to protect more people,” he said.
Bihar and West Bengal have returned to PMFBY and about 40 million farmers have got insurance cover. “We see opportunities for efficient use of technology by use of policies that can open up easier ways than causing conflict between cheapest insurance and not necessarily the best product,” said Basu.
India is an agricultural insurance powerhouse, and it is fourth in terms of overall premiums behind the US, Canada and China. In terms of coverage, it could be number two. However, premiums are dropping due to lower bids in tenders. The drop in premiums is influenced by competitive pricing and States’ participation,
El Nino impact
He, however, said better risk intelligence, ground-level data, faster distribution and fast claims management can create better products.
Asked if El Nino will lead to more insurance claims, Basu said it would happen. With the government introducing the Yield Estimation System based on Technology (YES-TECH) and the Wind Information and Network Data System (WINDS), information management will happen before the start of the season.
On claims, Basu said it was the toughest thing around the world and specifically for India. “That’s how you either lose or earn the farmers’ trust,” he said.
Much before the government could introduce Collection of Real-Time observations and Photographs of Crops (CROPIC), Wingsure had similar capabilities. “We conducted a four-state, government-supported factorial crop damage assessment in rabi, 2023, using GeoPen’s smartphone image capture and AI analysis, which is one of our core capabilities,” said the company’s founder and CEO.
Palm oil partnership
The company is trying to form a partnership in palm oil, where it can cover thousands of plantations in one shot “for people who are already providing them”.
The insurance firm is creating a verified intelligence layer which will enable it to make better decisions about the same farm without troubling the farmer to do repeated paperwork. This could provide additional revenue streams and other opportunities such as carbon credits, which the company is tracking.
On expediting insurance payout, he said it would allow them to resow within the same crop cycle. “It is the key. It cannot be taking weeks or months. It has to be as quick as possible,” he said.
Stating that technology has to be used to scale up agriculture insurance, Basu said the farmer has to be trusted, and the data collection has to be crowdsourced to the him/her.
Source - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com
