‘PM Modi has shown interest in Telangana’s scheme for farmers’

‘The PM wants a quick, transparent mechanism without involvement of middlemen.’

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to announce a direct investment subsidy scheme for farmers all over the country on the line of “Rythu Bandhu” programme implemented by the K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) led TRS government in Telangana since June 2018, as per indications from a meeting between the two leaders in Delhi on Wednesday.

A provision for the scheme with an outlay of around Rs 1.25 lakh crore would be introduced in the coming vote-on-account budget to be presented before Parliament early next year. The PM will lead the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign for the coming Lok Sabha elections that will be held in April/may 2019 and convey a message that his government was keen on addressing the raging agrarian crisis in the country.

The PM is considering coming up with a nationwide direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme that would help farmers who are mired in distress due to burgeoning cultivation costs and debts from the next agricultural season. The Rythu Bandhu scheme of Telangana is one of the options before the PM as he wants a quick and transparent mechanism without the involvement of middlemen.

Under Rythu Bandhu, the state government gives every farmer an assistance of Rs 8,000 per acre in a year in two instalments (Kharif and Rabi crops). Around 56 lakh farmers were extended this benefit which need not be repaid. KCR has announced in his election manifesto that the assistance would be increased to Rs 10,000 per acre from 1 April 2019.

According to sources close to the Chief Minister, who returned Hyderabad on Friday night, the PM has shown keenness to know more about Rythu Bandhu and its execution at the village level. The CM is learnt to have told the PM that Rythu Bandhu was one of the factors which had helped him win the Assembly elections with a massive majority.

The PM was pleased to know that the Telangana government had paid the first instalment in Junejuly of the scheme through cheques, while the second instalment in Octobernovember was paid online to the beneficiaries’ bank accounts. The CM had explained that the entire distribution of money was done by agriculture officials and there was no scope for politicians or middlemen.

The CM had told the PM that thanks to the scheme, the condition of farmers in Telangana has improved and that there were no suicides among them for the last few months. The average extent of cultivation, too, has gone up due to availability of crop investment. There was no upper limit on the amount to be given to each farmer.

Besides this direct investment transfer model, the PM is believed to be studying another option of setting up a corpus fund to make up for the loss of price of commodity of farmers if they have to sell below the support price. However, this method helps the farmers only after they had grown crops where the investment subsidy takes care of their money requirements at the beginning of the season.

Already, Telangana agriculture principal secretary C. Parthasarathi was called to Delhi by Niti Aayog officials, who wanted to know more about Rythu Bandhu early this year. However, they seemed to have dropped the idea due to the huge cost involved in it. Now that the PM was particular about offering a scheme before the elections, funds may not be a problem for its implementation.