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Centre to disburse next instalment of PM Kisan to over 90mn on May 14
The payouts slated for May 14 will be the first instalment of PM Kisan for financial year 2021-22.
The Union government will disburse the next instalment of PM Kisan, the federal cash transfer scheme for farmers, on May 14, a tranche that will see a few financial and political milestones.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi picked May 14 as the release date to coincide with Eid, an official with knowledge of the matter said. The last instalment of PM-Kisan was paid on Christmas i.e. December 25, 2020.
In a turnaround, the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government, which resisted implementing the scheme so far, has joined the cash transfer scheme for the first time, the official said. This was reported over the weekend.
In the upcoming tranche, about 90.5 million farmers have qualified to receive cash directly in their accounts, around ₹19,000 crore in all, the highest single tranche to be paid so far, according to the official cited above.
The last instalment on December 25, 2020 was worth ₹18,000 crore, although total payouts for that period ended up being higher due to additional farmers being validated.
The payouts slated for May 14 will be the first instalment of PM Kisan for financial year 2021-22.
Under PM-KISAN, the government provides income support of ₹6,000 a year to farmers with a valid enrolment, paid in three equal cash transfers of ₹2,000. It is paid once every four months: December to March, April to July and August to November. It was launched on 24 February 2019, when the first instalment was paid.
Although the government may choose any date between April and July to pay the financial year’s first instalment, last year, most beneficiaries were paid by April 20. States faced considerable hurdles, such as manpower shortage, in compilation and uploading of farmers’ data for the due instalment due to a crippling second wave of Covid-19 infections.
“The Centre gave states extra time to complete their part of the process such as opening and closing of lots (which refers to farmers’ data),” the official said.
States have to upload data to a centralized 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.
The Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal government signed on to the scheme on May 4. Nearly 700,000 farmers from the state are set to be paid ₹2000 each as direct cash transfer for the first time.
“The farmers’ data from West Bengal have been validated and sent back to the state for final signatures. Farmers there will receive cash payouts on May 14,” the official said.
West Bengal’s inclusion – or onboarding – in PM Kisan happened on May 4, a day after Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar wrote to chief minister Mamata Banerjee, urging her to send farmers’ data for the scheme.
“Chief minister Mamata Banerjee agreed to the state’s inclusion in the scheme quite sometime back. In fact she had written to the Centre. It’s the implementation that will now happen,” a Trinamool Congress spokesperson said.
A Union government official aware of the developments said West Bengal asked for its share of the cash to be transferred to the state government. The Union agriculture ministry declined the request, saying PM-Kisan was a direct cash transfer scheme, which gets paid into farmers’ bank accounts.
To be sure, the Modi government’s cash-for-farmers scheme still faces implementation hurdles, such as glitches in Aadhaar-based enrolment, slow internet connections in many rural centres and messy land records, the farm ministry had told a parliamentary panel last year.
Eligible farmer families are identified on the basis of operational land holding data according to the agricultural Census Data 2015-16, which is then extrapolated to 2018-19, an official said. It’s the job of state governments to provide accurate beneficiary data and payments are continuously updated.
“The Centre has to simultaneously work with state governments to clean up a lot of spurious data because right-to-information queries in the past have shown that ineligible individuals had been paid under PM-Kisan,” said RS Mani, a former economist with the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.
