Centre adds stringent checks on PM-KISAN
Nearly 3 million people ineligible for payouts under PM-KISAN received ₹2,900 crore in all since the scheme’s launch, according to latest available official audit figures.
The government has introduced new layers of checks regarding the disbursal of PM-KISAN funds, the cash transfer scheme for farmers, after it was found that there were staggering amounts of withdrawals by ineligible individuals across states.
Nearly 3 million people ineligible for payouts under PM-KISAN received ₹2,900 crore in all since the scheme’s launch, according to latest available official audit figures.
Under PM-KISAN, the government provides income support of ₹6,000 a year to every landowning farmer with a valid enrolment, paid in three equal cash transfers of ₹2,000 once every four months. The scheme was launched on February 24, 2019.
The government has rolled out a series of steps as well as guidelines to ensure “enhanced recovery mechanism”, tighter checks in collaboration with the income-tax department and physical verification of beneficiaries.
In India, well-off or ineligible people often receive benefits to which they are not entitled. The rich get “implicit” subsidies worth ₹1 lakh crore, according to the government’s Economic Survey 2015-16, which pointed to the need for better targeting of antipoverty schemes such as PM-KISAN.
Under PM-KISAN, a beneficiary has to be “a farmer family comprising husband, wife and minor children who own cultivable land as per land records”. Non-farmers are automatically excluded.
The exclusion guidelines say people who pay income tax or receive monthly pension of ₹10,000 or more after retiring from government service, former and current ministers, professionals and institutional landowners are not eligible for the scheme.
To remove ineligible individuals from the PM-KISAN database, a “physical verification module” has been launched, an official said, requesting anonymity. States now have to physically verify 5% of beneficiaries. To better target the detection of non-farmers, the selection of beneficiaries for random verification has been automated and is software-driven.
Besides, a separate module has been launched to verify 10% of beneficiaries immediately after payments are made. “These automated detection module will ramp up the audit process, as per updated guidelines of the scheme,” the official said.
The government has also intensified the process of collating the PM-KISAN database with the country’s income-tax database to weed out ineligible people from the scheme.
Standard operation guidelines have been issued for recovering money from ineligible beneficiaries, including registration of police complaints. A refund module has been developed on the PM-KISAN portal, which is used across the states to recover money from ineligible beneficiaries.
Alongside, a central project management unit of PM-KISAN scheme has been set up at the Centre to facilitate coordination among all stakeholders, the official said.