India’s fishers have free accident insurance worth up to ₹5 lakh. That much is well known. What almost nobody has asked — until now — is a harder question: when a fisher dies or is disabled at work, does the money actually arrive?
Parliament has now put the answer on record, state by state and year by year. In a Lok Sabha answer on Tuesday, 24 March 2026, the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying tabled five years of Group Accident Insurance Scheme (GAIS) data — how many fishers were covered, how many claims were filed, and how much money was actually disbursed in every state.
The headline numbers are striking. Between 2021-22 and 2025-26, 1,688 claims were paid out, totalling ₹82.18 crore. But the money did not spread evenly. Two states — Telangana and Tamil Nadu — took nearly nine rupees in every ten. Kerala, home to one of India’s largest marine fishing communities, recorded zero GAIS claims in all five years. And the MP who asked the question wanted to know whether ₹5 lakh is even enough in 2026 — a question the reply did not answer.
Here is what the Parliament data actually shows, state by state.
At a Glance: Five Years of Fisher Insurance Claims
| Item | Detail (Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 5078, answered 24 March 2026) |
|---|---|
| Scheme | Group Accident Insurance Scheme (GAIS), under the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY) |
| Cover | ₹5,00,000 for accidental death or permanent total disability; ₹2,50,000 for permanent partial disability; up to ₹25,000 for accidental hospitalisation |
| Premium | Paid entirely by the Centre and the states — the fisher pays nothing |
| Claims paid (2021-22 to 2025-26) | 1,688 claims, ₹82,17,95,220 (₹82.18 crore) |
| Claims filed in the same period | 2,578 (Annexure-I of the same answer) |
| Biggest pay-outs | Telangana: 910 claims, ₹45.21 crore; Tamil Nadu: 560 claims, ₹26.75 crore |
| Zero-claims states | Kerala recorded no GAIS claims in any of the five years; Andhra Pradesh does not appear in the data at all |
| 2025-26 figures | Partial year — the answer was given on 24 March 2026, before the coverage year ended on 31 May 2026 |
Year by Year: How Much Money Actually Reached Families
The annexure lists the claims disbursed in each coverage year. The amounts below are our totals, added up from the state-wise rows in Annexure-II of the Lok Sabha answer — every figure is traceable to the official table.
| Coverage year | Claims paid | Amount disbursed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 (26 Jul 2021 – 25 Jul 2022) | 345 | ₹16.92 crore | Telangana alone: 191 claims, ₹9.50 crore |
| 2022-23 (26 Jul 2022 – 25 Jul 2023) | 426 | ₹20.65 crore | Highest first-year growth; Telangana 242 claims |
| 2023-24 (26 Jul 2023 – 25 Jul 2024) | 333 | ₹16.15 crore | Tamil Nadu 128 claims; Telangana 166 |
| 2024-25 (1 Jun 2024 – 31 May 2025) | 422 | ₹20.79 crore | Biggest single year; Maharashtra jumps to 13 claims |
| 2025-26 (1 Jun 2025 – 31 May 2026) | 162 | ₹7.67 crore | Partial year — data only up to the 24 March 2026 answer |
| Total | 1,688 | ₹82.18 crore | Five coverage years |
Two things stand out. First, the scheme does pay — more than ₹16 crore a year in every complete year. Second, the pay-outs are remarkably concentrated. That concentration is the real story of this data.
The Leaderboard: Two States Took 87% of the Money
Add up the five years state by state, and the imbalance is impossible to miss.
| State / UT | Claims paid (5 years) | Amount paid (5 years) | Share of all money |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telangana | 910 | ₹45.21 crore | 55.0% |
| Tamil Nadu | 560 | ₹26.75 crore | 32.5% |
| Odisha | 95 | ₹4.43 crore | 5.4% |
| Puducherry | 28 | ₹1.26 crore | 1.5% |
| Maharashtra | 21 | ₹1.05 crore | 1.3% |
| Karnataka | 19 | ₹95 lakh | 1.2% |
| Chhattisgarh | 11 | ₹52.5 lakh | 0.6% |
| Gujarat | 9 | ₹45 lakh | 0.5% |
| Himachal Pradesh | 6 | ₹25.75 lakh | 0.3% |
| Uttar Pradesh | 5 | ₹20.21 lakh | 0.2% |
| Assam | 4 | ₹15.24 lakh | 0.2% |
| Jammu & Kashmir | 4 | ₹20 lakh | 0.2% |
| Bihar | 3 | ₹15 lakh | 0.2% |
| Jharkhand | 3 | ₹15 lakh | 0.2% |
| Andaman & Nicobar | 3 | ₹15 lakh | 0.2% |
| Rajasthan | 2 | ₹10 lakh | 0.1% |
| Lakshadweep | 2 | ₹5.18 lakh | 0.1% |
| Madhya Pradesh | 1 | ₹5 lakh | 0.1% |
| Manipur | 1 | ₹5 lakh | 0.1% |
| Goa | 1 | ₹5 lakh | 0.1% |
Telangana and Tamil Nadu together account for 1,470 of the 1,688 claims paid (87%) and ₹71.96 crore of the ₹82.18 crore disbursed (about 88%). Every other state and Union Territory combined shared the remaining ₹10 crore across five years.
Why so concentrated? The data itself suggests part of the answer: these are also the states with the largest enrolled fisher populations under the scheme. In 2024-25, Telangana had 4,16,000 fishers covered and Tamil Nadu 5,73,183 — far more than most other states. Telangana also files far more claims than anyone else: 309 claims filed in 2024-25 alone, against 209 in Tamil Nadu and 41 in Odisha. A state that enrols more fishers and files more claims will, naturally, see more money paid.
But enrolment alone does not explain everything. Odisha had 11,31,857 fishers covered in 2024-25 — the largest enrolled population in the country that year — yet only 41 claims were filed and 18 paid. Gujarat, with 1,10,000 fishers covered, filed 11 claims and saw 1 paid. The gap between enrolment and claims is where the questions live: are accidents rarer in those states, or are families simply not reaching the claim counter?
The Missing States: Kerala’s Zero and Andhra’s Absence
The most surprising rows in the Parliament data are the ones that are not there.
Kerala does not appear in the GAIS annexures at all — not in any of the five years. No fishers listed as covered, no claims filed, no money disbursed under the national scheme. That is remarkable for a state with one of India’s biggest marine fishing workforces. The explanation is not that Kerala’s fishers have no cover: the state runs its own compensation system. Kerala’s fisheries department data, reported by The Times of India on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, shows 1,607 accidents at sea over the last ten years, with around 2,400 fisher families receiving insurance compensation in that period — and the state’s own death payout to a fisher’s family has been ₹10 lakh since 2017, double the national GAIS amount. Kerala also announced a separate natural-death insurance cover for registered fishermen on Thursday, 17 September 2026. The national scheme’s absence from Kerala’s record is a story of parallel systems, not of unprotected fishers — but it also means Kerala’s families cannot be compared with other states on the national table.
Andhra Pradesh is also absent from all five years of the annexure. That fits what Parliament was told separately: the state joined GAIS for the first time only in 2026-27, with proposals received to cover 2,84,888 fishers, according to a Rajya Sabha answer on 29 July 2026. For a state with one of India’s longest coastlines, five years of zero national insurance claims is a gap the new enrolment is meant to close — and the first Andhra claims will only show up in next year’s data.
West Bengal appears just once, with 8,499 fishers listed as covered in 2022-23 — and not a single claim filed.
Filed vs Paid: The Gap Families Should Know About
The same Lok Sabha answer gives two totals that every fishing family should understand. Across the five coverage years, 2,578 claims were filed (Annexure-I), while 1,688 were disbursed (Annexure-II). Roughly a third of filed claims had not been paid by the date of the answer.
That gap is not the same as a rejection rate, and this article will not present it as one. Some of those claims were rejected, some were still being processed by the insurer, and many belong to the 2025-26 coverage year, which was still running when the answer was given on 24 March 2026 — Tamil Nadu alone had 119 claims filed in that partial year, with 45 approved and the rest still moving through the system. The annexure’s own columns do not fully reconcile in every row, so the honest reading is: about two in three filed claims had been paid by the answer date; the rest were pending, in process, or rejected.
One number does not line up cleanly, and we flag it rather than hide it. A separate Rajya Sabha answer on 11 February 2026 said 3,261 accidental death claims were reported under the scheme over 2021-22 to 2025-26 — higher than the 2,578 claims filed in the Lok Sabha annexure for the same window. The two answers count different things (“reported” against “filed”, with different answer dates and coverage-year boundaries), and neither document explains the difference. We report both, with their sources, and do not try to reconcile them.
Is ₹5 Lakh Enough? The Question Parliament Left Unanswered
The MP who asked Question 5078, Shri Sribharat Mathukumilli, did not only ask for the numbers. He asked two pointed follow-ups: had the government conducted or commissioned any study on whether the ₹5 lakh accidental cover is adequate, given inflation, rising living costs and the socio-economic conditions of fisher households — and does the government propose to enhance the cover, and if so, by how much and when?
The reply contains no mention of any adequacy study and no proposal to raise the ₹5 lakh cover. Instead, it points to the jump already made: under the earlier Blue Revolution scheme the cover was ₹2 lakh for death or total disability, ₹1 lakh for partial disability and ₹10,000 for hospitalisation. PMMSY raised those to ₹5 lakh, ₹2.5 lakh and ₹25,000. That is the government’s answer to the adequacy question — the last increase, not a new one.
The question is live again right now, outside Parliament. On Wednesday, 11 November 2026, the Madras High Court heard the case of nine Kasimedu fishermen who died at sea when Cyclone Murasu sank their trawler. Justice V Lakshminarayanan described the ₹2.5 lakh insurance figure put before the court as a paltry sum and directed the boat owner to work out far higher compensation on the same formula used for road-accident victims. The court reviews the matter again on Monday, 16 November 2026. The Tamil Nadu government has announced ₹7 lakh solatium per family, with ₹2 lakh paid immediately — but whether each of the nine men was enrolled under GAIS has not been confirmed in the reports.
Kerala’s own numbers sharpen the comparison: the state has paid ₹10 lakh to a deceased fisher’s family since 2017 — twice the national GAIS amount. If a state government values a fisher’s life at ₹10 lakh, the national ₹5 lakh figure looks, at best, like a floor rather than a ceiling.
What GAIS Pays — and the Three Deadlines That Decide a Claim
For families, the scheme’s rules matter more than the statistics. GAIS covers marine and inland fishers and allied fish workers aged 18 to 70, and the entire premium is shared between the Centre and the states — 60:40 for general states, 90:10 for Himalayan and North-Eastern states, and fully by the Centre in Union Territories. The fisher pays nothing. The National Fisheries Development Board is the nodal agency, and cover is provided through the Oriental Insurance Company Ltd.
| Event | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Accidental death or permanent total disability | ₹5,00,000 |
| Permanent partial disability | ₹2,50,000 |
| Accidental hospitalisation | Up to ₹25,000 |
The claim only pays if the family acts in time. Three deadlines decide everything:
- Report the accident within 120 days of the accident.
- Submit the complete claim file within 180 days of the accident.
- The insurer must settle within 15 days of receiving the complete claim proposal.
Miss the first two, and the money can be lost no matter how genuine the case. That is why the gap between filed and paid claims matters: a claim that is never filed is invisible in every table above.
How to Check Your Enrolment and File a Claim
- Confirm you are enrolled. Enrolment runs through your State or Union Territory Fisheries Department — ask your district fisheries office whether your name is on the GAIS list for the current coverage year. Andhra Pradesh fishers: your state joined only in 2026-27, so check that the new enrolment includes you.
- After an accident, intimate the claim immediately — do not wait. The 120-day clock starts on the day of the accident, and the insurer counts from that date.
- Gather the documents early: the FIR or police report, the death certificate or disability certificate, the hospital records, the fisher’s identity and bank details, and the enrolment proof. Incomplete files are the most common reason claims stall.
- Submit the complete proposal within 180 days through the district fisheries office channel — not by approaching the insurer directly.
- Track the 15-day settlement rule. Once the complete proposal is with the insurer, settlement is due within 15 days. If it drags, escalate through the district fisheries office and the National Fisheries Development Board.
- Remember what GAIS does not cover. It pays for accidents only. Death from natural causes — illness, a heart attack — is not covered, however tragic. Kerala’s separate natural-death cover, announced in September 2026, exists precisely because of this gap.
What This Data Means for Fishing Families
Five years of Parliament data tell a story with two faces. On one side, the national safety net works: ₹82.18 crore reached 1,688 families, the premium costs fishers nothing, and the cover is real money for people who had almost no protection a decade ago. On the other side, the protection is uneven — two states take 87% of the pay-outs, Kerala sits outside the national system entirely, Andhra Pradesh only joined this year, and the ₹5 lakh figure has not been revised since PMMSY began, despite a direct question in Parliament and a High Court judge calling the sums paltry.
The most useful number in this whole story may be the simplest: 2,578 claims filed against 1,688 paid. Every claim that was never filed is a family the tables never see. Check your enrolment, know the 120-day and 180-day deadlines, and keep the documents ready before the sea tests them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much money has GAIS actually paid to fishing families?
A: ₹82.18 crore across 1,688 claims in the five coverage years from 2021-22 to 2025-26, according to Annexure-II of Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 5078, answered on 24 March 2026. The 2025-26 figure is partial, as the answer predates the end of that coverage year.
Q: Which state got the most insurance money?
A: Telangana — 910 claims worth ₹45.21 crore, more than half of all the money paid. Tamil Nadu is second with 560 claims worth ₹26.75 crore. Together the two states took about 87% of all pay-outs.
Q: Why does Kerala show zero claims in the Parliament data?
A: Kerala does not appear in the GAIS annexures for any of the five years. The state’s fishers are covered by Kerala’s own compensation system instead — the state has paid ₹10 lakh to a deceased fisher’s family since 2017, and around 2,400 families received insurance compensation over the last decade, according to state fisheries department data reported on 3 November 2026.
Q: Is the ₹5 lakh cover going to be increased?
A: No proposal to raise it appears in the Lok Sabha reply of 24 March 2026, and the reply records no adequacy study. The last increase was the jump from ₹2 lakh to ₹5 lakh when PMMSY replaced the Blue Revolution scheme’s insurance.
Q: What are the deadlines for a GAIS claim?
A: Report the accident within 120 days, submit the complete claim file within 180 days, and the insurer must settle within 15 days of receiving the complete proposal. Claims go through the district fisheries office, not directly to the insurer.
Q: Does GAIS cover the fishing boat as well?
A: No. GAIS covers the fisher, not the vessel. A separate fishing-vessel insurance scheme under PMMSY — hull, machinery, nets and collision liability at a 2% premium plus GST, with up to 40–60% premium subvention — has been designed and priced, and Parliament has been told it is at its final stage for rollout, but no enrolment window had been announced as of our last check.
Images in this post are illustrations. All figures are from the official Parliament records cited below, read on 14 November 2026.
Related reading: PMMSY Insurance: ₹5 Lakh Cover for Fishers · ₹5 Lakh Fisher Cover: The 120-Day Claim Rule to Know · Andhra Joins Fisher Insurance: 2.85 Lakh Fishers In · 9 Fishers Died at Sea: HC Tells Owner to Pay More · Kerala Fishers: 1,607 Sea Accidents in 10 Years
Sources & Fact-Check Note (14 November 2026)
- Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 5078, answered Tuesday, 24 March 2026, by the Minister of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying (Shri Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh) — question by Shri Sribharat Mathukumilli. Main reply and Annexure-I (claims filed, approved, rejected, pending, state-wise) and Annexure-II (claims disbursed and amounts, state-wise) read live on sansad.in on 14 November 2026. Year and state totals in this post are our own additions from the annexure rows; the five-year totals (1,688 claims, ₹82,17,95,220) reconcile exactly with the sum of the state rows.
- Rajya Sabha answer, 11 February 2026 (Q1327) — Centre released ₹149.07 crore for GAIS cover for 167.33 lakh fishers (2021-22 to 2025-26); 3,261 accidental death claims reported. Cited as published in our earlier coverage; it does not reconcile with the Lok Sabha annexure’s 2,578 claims filed, and this post says so openly rather than choosing one figure silently.
- Madras High Court order, Wednesday, 11 November 2026 (Justice V Lakshminarayanan) — Kasimedu fishermen, Cyclone Murasu; next hearing Monday, 16 November 2026. As reported in our 12 November 2026 coverage.
- Kerala sea-accident data — state fisheries department figures reported by The Times of India on Tuesday, 3 November 2026: 1,607 accidents in 10 years, around 2,400 families compensated, ₹10 lakh death payout since 2017. As reported in our 5 November 2026 coverage.
- Kerala natural-death cover — announced Thursday, 17 September 2026 by Fisheries Minister V E Abdul Gafoor; announced, not launched; no sum insured, premium or enrolment date published.
- Andhra Pradesh GAIS participation — Rajya Sabha answer, 29 July 2026: proposals received to cover 2,84,888 fishers in 2026-27, first-time participation.
- GAIS benefit levels, premium sharing (60:40 / 90:10 / 100% Centre in UTs), age band 18–70, NFDB as nodal agency and Oriental Insurance Company as insurer, and the 120/180/15-day claim timelines — from the Parliament answers cited above and the PMMSY operational guidelines, as covered in our earlier posts.
Honest notes: the 2025-26 figures are partial (answer dated 24 March 2026; coverage year ends 31 May 2026). The annexure’s filed/approved/rejected/pending columns do not fully reconcile in every state row, so this post reports filed (2,578) and disbursed (1,688) as separate totals and does not claim a precise rejection rate. The Rajya Sabha’s 3,261 “reported” death claims and the Lok Sabha annexure’s 2,578 “filed” claims measure different things and do not match; both are reported with sources. No future pay-out, enrolment total or cover increase is claimed — none is published.