Wrms Index
Damaris
Batra, N.; Amarnath, Giriraj. 2023. Development of a flood index insurance product for Zambia. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (IWMI). CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience. 18p.
Weather Risk Management Services Pvt Ltd (WRMS) is collaborating with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) as part of the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) to develop financial solutions for post-extreme climatic events. The focus is on creating parametric insurance solutions to aid vulnerable populations in managing and mitigating loss and damage caused by natural disasters, with a primary emphasis on floods.The project's scope involves a comprehensive approach to enhance community resilience through financial solutions for flood. It begins with identifying vulnerable locations using secondary data sources. The subsequent steps include developing parametric insurance products, setting triggers and damage ratios based on past events, and evaluating community vulnerability.
Zambia is particularly prone to seasonal floods from November to April. Major rivers like Zambezi, Kafue, and Luangwa can lead to widespread inundation, impacting lives, displacing communities, damaging infrastructure, and disrupting agriculture. The project focuses on flood risk in specific regions, the Kafue flats area in Lusaka and Southern Provinces.Data sources crucial for assessing flood severity include river water level, dam discharge data, and rainfall. The study utilizes historical data from 1980-2023 for water level and discharge, and 2000-2020 for rainfall, collected from multiple locations in the Kafue plains area.The development of the flood index-based insurance product involves analyzing data to determine triggers for flash floods and riverine floods. The shortlisted region experienced severe flooding in the past, and detailed analysis has been done to validate if the collected data sets capture both the intensity and duration of those extreme events.The proposed index insurance product features triggers based on water level and rainfall data, offering fast and transparent settlement with low administrative costs. For riverine floods, payouts depend on the increase in daily water level from a set benchmark, considering the number of days above the threshold. For flash floods, compensation is triggered by excess rainfall over a specified period.Ultimately, the project aims to offer a combined flood coverage product addressing both flash and riverine floods, contributing to the overall goal of strengthening disaster resilience through integrated risk analysis, financial solutions, and actionable protocols.
WRMS (Weather Risk Management Services) is an agricultural and climate risk management company transforming the agriculture sector for the last 18 years by leveraging data, technology and financial innovation. Our mission is to develop risk management solutions to help farmers enhance productivity, gain an assured income and build resilience against climate change effects while practicing sustainable farming.
The company has been founded by Sonu Agrawal (IIT, IIM alumnus) along with CA Anuj Kumbhat (Chartered Accountant) and Dr. Ashish Agarwal (PhD, Electrical Engineering from IIT). UPL Limited (erstwhile United Phosphorus Limited), an Indian multinational company that manufactures and markets agrochemicals, industrial chemicals, chemical intermediates, and specialty chemicals, and also offers crop protection solutions, is the largest stakeholder and a key investor in WRMS.
Ingen Technologies Private Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of WRMS established in 2008, manufactures, supplies and installs agriculture and supply chain related IoT devices for government and private sectors. The IoT devices provided by WRMS for the agriculture, dairy industry and supply chain logistic solutions add up to the major revenue stream for the company. The company also offers accurate and real-time weather data services using automated weather stations that help measure parameters like temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and solar radiation every second.
We have a 500-member team with presence across 22 states in India; and have experience of working in 15 countries across the globe. Our team comprises experts from diverse fields including agriculture, data science, actuarial sciences, and IT.
WRMS is more than just an agriculture technology company. WRMS provides farmers with farm-level advisory, complete income protection, and farm-level loss assessment through SecuFarm. It is the first Smart & Sustainable Farming solution in the world that ensures livelihood stability of farmers.
Having an expansive experience of almost two decades in the sector, WRMS has worked prolifically with some of the leading names in the agro-input and procurement industry like Pepsico, Safal, ITC, Mother Dairy, etc. along with government and govt-run bodies like NCFC, APSDPS, KSNDMC and Bihar Government. With over 2.5 million farmers served, 1 million acres of land geo-tagged and 10,000+ IoT devices installed, WRMS is a leader in the agriculture and dairy risk management industry.
WRMS can be credited for introducing many firsts such as bundling the global first parametric insurance with agri-input value chain. It started CARM services in India; Introduced bundled solutions of Index Insurance (BICSA), India and Bangladesh; Satellite-based flood index insurance product, UP; Index insurance for securing credit to chili farmers, Andhra Pradesh; Parametric insurance based disaster risk financing solution, Fiji and many others.
18 years of WRMS journey is filled with challenges we have overcome. WRMS is at a juncture where our products and services have proven track record of quality and service. Our challenge is to get the capital scale up to expand each of these product lines. We are also looking to scale SecuFarm solution in all parts of the country by partnering with like-minded organisations like FPOs, lending institutions, impact organisations, agri-input companies, etc. working with farmers.
We started our risk management journey in 2005 by creating a full-stack digital-first solution to help insurers and reinsurers understand, quantify, and manage the risks associated with weather events and crop yields. As a pioneer, WRMS has bagged many world firsts in the parametric insurance space like designing and implementing the first-ever parametric insurance solution for countries like Fiji, Indonesia, Haiti, Fiji, Tonga, India and Bangladesh. We have also served diverse agri value chain players like seed companies, contract farming companies, and agri-input companies with their very first value-chain-enabled bundled index insurance solutions.
WRMS has developed a full-stack digital-first platform for designing, development and implementation of innovative risk management solutions. The platform allows development of Indexes based on diverse datasets, including
The platform enables holistic risk management that includes Product Validation, Product Design, Data Management, Product Education, Beneficiary Onboarding, Policy Management, Claim Calculation & Payouts.
WRMS aids the government bodies in the effective implementation of government schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY schemes) by subsidy optimization, timely loss assessment & claim settlement, providing farm-level manpower services for crop assessment & monitoring agriculture insurance, and promoting innovation in agriculture.
Consequently, the PMFBY plan becomes transparent, manageable, cost- and time-effective, and manageable. Additionally, in order to perform pilot research for the improvement of crop cutting experiments, the company collaborates with governmental organisations like the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) (CCEs).
Ingen Technologies, a fully-owned subsidiary of Weather Risk Management Services (WRMS) has also collaborated with the Regional Meteorological Centre, Guwahati, Assam, India, Meteorological Department (IMD), and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India, and bagged the contract for procurement, installation, and maintenance of Automatic Rain Gauge Stations in the North East States of India. The company is working with many government organizations like Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, Andhra Pradesh State Development Planning Society, and more.
The difficulties we have in persuading Indian farmers to use smart farming techniques include low literacy rates, traditional agricultural methods, a lack of trust in adopting technology, limited investment capacity, and herd mentality. Because farming involves risk and uncertainty, farmers are unwilling to change.
WRMS got Euro 2.1 Mn funding last year. It is using the funding to develop and implement the yield guarantee solution to improve the resilience of 100,000 smallholder farmers in India against climate risks and incentivize smart agricultural risk management practices as well as to scale up the yield guarantee solution for crops such as cotton, chili, paddy, wheat and potato.
The ILRS products consist of SINEX files of weekly station coordinates and daily Earth Orientation Parameters (x-pole, y-pole and excess Length-Of-Day (LOD)) estimated from 7-day arcs (Sunday 00 UTC to Saturday 24 UTC). Two types of products are distributed each week: a loosely constrained estimation of coordinates and EOP and an EOP solution, derived from the previous one and constrained to an ITRF, currently ITRF2000. Official ILRS Analysis Centers (AC) and Combination Centers (CC) are tasked with the generation of the products with individual and combined solutions respectively. Both the individual and combined solutions follow strict standards agreed upon within the ILRS Analysis Working Group to provide high quality products consistent with the IERS Conventions 2003. The standards of the ILRS products are subject to change to improve the quality and other types of products will be considered. This description refers to the status as of January 2007.