Govt to release ₹19k cr under Pm-kisan: Modi

NEW DELHI: The Union government will disburse the next instalment of Pm-kisan, its cash transfer scheme for farmers, on August 9, totalling ₹19,000 crore to about 90 million farmers, an official with knowledge of the matter said.

Under Pm-kisan, the government provides annual income support of ₹6,000 to every landowning farmer with a valid enrolment. The money is paid in three equal cash transfers of ₹2,000, once every four months. The scheme was launched on 24 February 2019.

In the last instalment paid in May this year, the government disbursed slightly over ₹19,000 crore to 90 million farm households. So far, the Union government has paid nearly ₹1.15 lakh crore under the scheme.

In reply to a parliamentary question last week, farm minister Narendra Tomar said that nearly 4.2 million people who were not eligible for payouts under the scheme were given ₹2,900 crore since the scheme’s roll-out. Tomar added that states, where ineligible people received money, have been asked to recover the amount according to guidelines in force.

Any farmer can enrol for Pm-kisan by applying at local revenue offices or a state’s nodal officer for the scheme, who is nominated by the state government. Farmers can also self-register through the Pm-kisan portal and common service centres, a network of public-services offices. “The identification of beneficiaries is the responsibility of state governments,” the official quoted above said.

States have to upload data to a centralised public finance management system, a platform that auto verifies bank accounts and checks biometric Aadhaar details of beneficiaries sent by states. These are then sent back to states for physical signatures.

Meanwhile, in a virtual interaction with the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PM-GKAY) beneficiaries in Gujarat, Modi said that the scheme helped lakhs of poor people during the pandemic.

“Since Independence, almost every government had talked about providing cheap food to the poor. The scope and budget of cheap ration schemes increased year after year, but the effect it should have had remained limited...,” he said.

Free ration was made available to more than 80 crore people under the scheme during the pandemic with an expenditure of more than ₹2 lakh crore, he said.