PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana

About PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana

• PM KISAN is an initiative by the Government of India to which all farmers will get up to. 6,000 per year as minimum income support.
• The Scheme is in effect from 01.12.2018. The scheme was officially launched on 24th February 2019. It was announced in the 2019 Interim Budget.
• The scheme has a cost? 75,000 crore per annum. It is a new Central Sector Scheme.

Objectives of PM KISAN Yojana

• With a view to providing income support to all land-holding eligible farmer families, the Government has launched PM-KISAN. The revised Scheme is expected to cover around 2 crores more farmers, increasing the coverage of PM-KISAN to around 14.5 crore beneficiaries.
• The scheme aims to supplement the financial needs of the farmers in procuring various inputs to ensure proper crop health and appropriate yields, commensurate with the anticipated farm income.
• Earlier, under the scheme, the financial benefit has been provided to all Small and Marginal landholder farmer families with total cultivable holding up to 2 hectares with a benefit of Rs.6000 per annum per family payable in 3 equal installments, every 4 months.

Other Features of PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojna

• Definition of the family for the Scheme is husband, wife and minor children.
• The entire responsibility of identification of beneficiary farmer families rests with the State / UT Governments.
• The fund is directly transferred (DBT) to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries.
• The Scheme was initially meant for Small and Marginal Farmers but later extended to all landholding farmers from 1.06.2019.
• Farmers covered under the Exclusion Criteria of the Operational Guidelines are not eligible for the benefit of the Scheme (Given above).
• For enrollment, the farmer is required to approach the local patwari/revenue officer / Nodal Officer (PM-Kisan) nominated by the State Government.
• The Common Service Centres (CSCs) have also been authorized to do registration of the farmers for the Scheme upon payment of fees.
• Farmers can also do their self-registration through the Farmers Corner in the portal.
• Farmers can also edit their names in the PM Kisan Nidhi Samman yojana database as per their Aadhaar database/card through the Farmers Corner in the portal.
• Farmers can also know the status of their payment through the Farmers Corner in the portal.

Critical Analysis of PM KISAN Yojana

• The direct transfer of funds is an advantage of this scheme. On December 25, 2020, in the presence of PM Narendra Modi, Rs.18,000 crores were directly transferred to the bank accounts of 9 crore farmers
• All the records related to farmers is registered officially on a digital platform which has made the registration and fund transfer easy. The digitalised records have brought about a new start to this welfare scheme
• It helps in increasing the liquidity of farmers, modernization of agriculture and doubling farmers’ income.
• As on 22nd February 2022, benefits under the PM Kisan scheme have been provided to about 11.78 Crore farmers and funds amounting to Rs1.82 lakh crore in various instalments have been released to the eligible beneficiaries of this scheme across India. Out of which Rs. 1.29 lakh crore has been released during the current Covid 19 pandemic period.
• Self-registration Mechanism: Process of Self-registration of beneficiaries has been made simple and easy through mobile app, PM KISAN portal and walk-ins via Common Service Centers in order to give the maximum benefit to the farmers.
• Enhanced Recovery Mechanism: In case of ineligible beneficiary, recovery mechanism has been made very smooth and transparent which doesn’t require a Demand Draft or physical cheque to be submitted by the state. The process includes auto transfer from the state nodal department’s account to the central government account which made this process very efficient and less time-consuming.
• Grievance Redressal& Helpdesk: In order to address the issues and problems faced by the beneficiaries, a holistic grievance redressal mechanism has been envisaged which involves setting up of a central Project Management Unit of PM KisanSammanNidhiYojana at the Centre which performs the overall coordination between all the stakeholders to streamline the processes. A centralized helpdesk has also been introduced in order to support the beneficiaries regarding any issues faced during the registration process or for any other query. Through this initiative, about 11.34 lakh grievances have been received from farmers and more than 10.92 lakh grievances have been redressed by the concerned state authorities.
• Physical Verification Module: In order to maintain the authenticity and validity of the scheme, a mandatory physical verification of 5% beneficiary every year is being done as per the provisions laid down in the scheme. With the help of Physical Verification Module, now the selection of beneficiary for physical verification has been totally automated and no manual intervention is required. A separate module has been introduced for the validation of 10% of the beneficiaries after the payment for the last trimester on 14th May 2021.
• Income Tax verification: The beneficiary database in this scheme is being regularly validated with the income tax payee database in order to have an audited and authenticated user base.
• Demographic Aadhar authentication: To make this whole process more transparent and authenticated, Aadhar validation has been made compulsory. As of now 11.20 Crores beneficiaries data is Aadhar seeded in the scheme.