file. , Photo Credit: Reuters
The number of farmers receiving the 11th installment of funds from the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) has declined by 67%, according to the agriculture ministry’s response to activist Kanhaiya Kumar’s Right to Information query. PM-KISAN is a flagship central scheme that was launched in 2019 to pay ₹6,000 per year in three installments of ₹2,000 each to eligible farmer families.
The installment-wise payment success report of the agriculture ministry revealed that only 3.87 crore farmers had received the 11th installment of ₹2,000 in their accounts in May-June 2022. This is very less as compared to the 11.84 crore farmers who got the first installment back in February 2019. , just before the Lok Sabha elections. The latest 12th installment was to be delivered in October 2022.
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The process of reduction from 11.84 crore farmers in the first installment started from the sixth installment which got 9.87 crore farmers. Seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth installments got 9.30, 8.59, 7.66 and 6.34 crore people respectively.
Ministry did not respond HinduThe question on why the number of beneficiaries has decreased so rapidly.
The data showed that the number of beneficiaries decreased from 55.68 lakh to 28.2 lakh in Andhra Pradesh. In Bihar, the number of beneficiaries went up from 83 lakh to seven lakh, while in Chhattisgarh, instead of 37 lakh people who got the amount in the first instalment, only two lakh farmers got the 11th instalment.
In poll-bound Gujarat, 63.13 lakh farmers got the amount in 2019 and only 28.41 lakh farmers got the benefit of the scheme in 2022. In Haryana, 19.73 lakh farmers got the first installment and 11.59 lakh farmers got the 11. th installment. In Maharashtra, this number is set to decline from 1.09 crore in 2019 to 37.51 lakh in 2022. In Madhya Pradesh, while 88.63 lakh farmers got help in 2019, only 12,053 of them got the amount in 2022. In Meghalaya, 627 farmers got it. 2022 as against 1.95 lakh farmers in 2019. In Punjab, this number decreased from 23.34 lakh to 11.31 lakh.
In Uttar Pradesh, 2.6 crore farmers availed the assistance in 2019 and it is expected to drop by half to 1.26 crore in 2022. According to the data, 45.63 lakh farmers got the amount in West Bengal in 2019 and no farmer got the money after the sixth. installment. The state government had taken up the matter with Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar.
In Assam, the number of payees decreased from 28.79 lakh to 2.54 lakh. In Chandigarh, in May-June 2022, only three people got the amount. In Delhi, this number came down from 16,513 to 2,065. In Himachal Pradesh too, this number has halved from 9.86 lakh to 5.43 lakh. The number of beneficiaries receiving payments in Jammu and Kashmir was up from 12.07 lakh in 2019 to 5.61 lakh. In Jharkhand, 4.17 lakh farmers got money in May-June. In 2019, 27.07 lakh people got the amount. In BJP-ruled Karnataka, this number came down from 55.61 lakh to 2.58 lakh. In Kerala, 24.23 lakh beneficiaries received the payment in 2022 as against 36.99 lakh in 2019. Similarly, 7.05 lakh farmers in Odisha got the payment in 2022 as against 39.20 lakh in 2019. In Tamil Nadu, 23.04 lakh farmers got the amount in 2022 and 46.8 lakh in 2019. In Telangana, 24.32 lakh people got the payment in 2022 and 39.10 lakh farmers received for the first installment. In Tripura too, the number has come down to half.
Ashok Dhawale, president of the All India Kisan Sabha, termed these figures as ‘extremely shocking’. “According to this data in 2022 two-thirds of the farmers have not received the payment. There is no logical reason for such a shortfall in the number of beneficiaries. This shows that the Center is trying to gradually phase out the scheme. The scheme is not a substitute for the legally guaranteed MSP. This scheme was another gimmick to avoid the real problems of the farmers.
No money has been transferred to any fraudulent beneficiary under the PM-Kisan scheme, the ministry said, adding that benefits are directly transferred to bank accounts only after receipt of 100% error-free data of farmers from states , which is validated through Aadhaar or Public Financial Management System (PFMS) database.
The government had earlier said that so far eligible farmer families have received benefits of over Rs 2 lakh crore through 11 installments under the scheme. “Out of this ₹1.6 lakh crore has been transferred during the period of COVID-19 pandemic. With the 12th installment to be released by the Prime Minister on October 17, the total amount to be transferred to the beneficiaries is expected to exceed Rs 2.16 lakh crore.