Ineligible beneficiaries in PM Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme weeded out: Union Govt
Karam Prakash
New Delhi, February 11
Facing strong opposition from farmers and Opposition leaders over the cut in the flagship scheme of the agriculture sector—the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi–Union government on Friday claimed as there were a lot of duplicate entries in the list of beneficiaries, therefore, they had to be weeded out. Every eligible beneficiary will continue to get benefits of the scheme and therefore virtually there is no cut in the budget, clarified the government.
As per this year’s Budget Estimate, the budget allocation of the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, has dropped by Rs 8,000 crores — at a time when the farmers were hoping for a raise.
Under the scheme, eligible farmers are provided with a financial benefit of Rs 6,000 per year in three equal instalments of Rs 2,000 (every four month). The fund is directly transferred to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries.
Commenting on the ineligible beneficiaries in the list, the Union government in the house said, “Deceased and ineligible beneficiaries are being removed by way of continuous verification and validation of the beneficiary’s data. The government has formulated the necessary processes for the recovery of benefit amount transferred to the ineligible beneficiaries.”
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in the Lok Sabha that all eligible beneficiaries would continue to get the benefit of the scheme implying that there was no impact of the budget slash. “There is a lot of data updation going on in the scheme. Deduplication analysis of the beneficiaries is being done by the Agriculture ministry. Every eligible beneficiary will continue to get the benefit of the scheme, therefore, there is no cut per say,” Sitharaman replied to the opposition MPs.
As to the increment in the benefit, Agriculture Minister Narendra Tomar said there was no proposal to hike the amount from 6,000 per year under PM-Kisan. ThePM-Kisan scheme was started in 2018.
Mindful of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement of doubling the farmer’s income by end of the year 2022, the finance minister said that process of doubling the farmer’s income was still under process. She said, “State Bank of India (SBI) report stated that farmer’s income has doubled in some states for some crops in the financial year 2022 as compared to 2018. The income of soybean farmers in Maharashtra and cotton farmers in Karnataka have doubled. In other cases, it didn’t double, but has increased by 1.7 times.”
Recently, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal had said that the union government had announced that the farmers’ income would be doubled by 2022, but instead farmers’ debt has doubled over the past few years.
