Vyasa Krishna Burugupalli, MD &CEO, Kshema General Insurance Company
Hyderabad:
Kickstarting its operations, Kshema General Insurance Company, the country’s newest general insurance company with an exclusive focus on agriculture, has appointed Vyasa Krishna Burugupalli as its managing director and CEO.
Vyasa Krishna is an insurance consultant with specialisation in the agriculture sector. He has also worked with various NGOs including the Bill and Melinda Gates on rural microinsurance.
Kshema General Insurance Company will be the second company after state owned Agriculture Insurance Company to undertake stand alone crop insurance business, the third largest insurance portfolio after Health and Motor business.
Promoted by Hyderabad based entrepreneur Natraj Nukala and their family office, Kshema General Insurance Company will be a rural digital insurance company and will cater predominantly to cultivators of the Agriculture & Food Sectors.
The company had received its license from insurance regulator IRDAI in November 2022.
Natraj also runs ITUS, an insurance broking firm.
US based Rajeshnani Dasari, senior director of Oracle Corporation, has also joined Kshema’s board as a director.
Kshema will be a completely digital-first company and will operate on a Direct-to-customer (D2C) model.
The company is building farm-level parametric insurance products and will create products for those crops that are not covered by existing insurance products.
Kshema will use its location-aware platform iAGRI to price insurance premiums adequately.
It has built a proprietary location-aware risk platform that assesses and accurately prices risk in all the 127 agro-climatic zones in India giving it a spatially diversified risk pool. The platform accesses reputed databases to gather information on the geo-tagged farms.
By using timely information provided by various sources such as satellite images and IoT devices, Kshema will offer relevant insurance covers to individual farm units.
Kshema will also launch products which are indemnity-based and index-based. It will also participate in Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana(PMFBY) /Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) after its empanelment by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare.
Earlier, the company had done a pilot study among farmers hailing from almost 20 states and 85 different crops, and has gathered data to prepare its business blue print.
The company’s data show historical claims ratio for crop insurance in India has been well within 70 per cent, which is much lesser compared to the claims ratios of other lines of businesses.