In a move to ensure the inclusion of all eligible farmers in the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme, the Centre has embarked on an extensive saturation drive, sources informed CNBC-TV18. The PM-KISAN initiative, aimed at providing financial support to land-owning farmers across India, has received complains from farmers about exclusion. In response, the government is taking concrete steps to verify and digitally enrol farmers.

"Grievances are still being received from farmers on their non-inclusion under the scheme. This is mainly on two accounts. One, the land details of the farmer are not as per the land record system of the state and two, the e-KYC of the farmer has not been done. Under these circumstances, there is still scope to cover more beneficiaries under the PM-KISAN scheme," sources told CNBC-TV18.

However, sources add, the scheme may never achieve a 100% saturation level of land owners because of various exclusion criteria defined in the operational guidelines.

"To help states achieve near 100% saturation of all eligible but left-out land-owning families, the Ministry has created an IT system where the saturation can be driven largely automatically and farmers are not forced to submit documents to get PM-KISAN benefits," they told CNBC-TV18.

One of the cornerstones of this effort is the introduction of the PM-KISAN Mobile App, which will allow farmers to register digitally and also help create comprehensive farmer registries in states, sources said.

The farmer's consent through e-sign (Aadhaar based) and e-KYC would only be taken as part of the registration and verification process, sources explain and the e-KYC will be carried out through a facial or an OTP process. There is also a plan to enable fingerprint based (biometric) authentication through the app. This way, all requirements of e-KYC/authentication and verification of farmer's lands would be digitally done for easy verification and enrolment into PM-KISAN. In this process, a farmer's registry will also be in place for States for future use, sources told CNBCTV18.

These state-specific farmer registries will have a wide range of applications like facilitating access to crop loans, distribution of Kisan Credit Cards (KCC), procurement of agricultural produce at Minimum Support Prices (MSP) among others.

Initially, the saturation drive will be piloted in seven states. With state elections on the horizon, the Centre aims to scale up the PM-KISAN saturation drive across the entire country.

It's worth noting that there is a significant gap between the number of land-owning farmers in India and the current PM-KISAN database. While there are approximately 9.5 crore land-owning farmers, PM-KISAN's data base stands at 8.75 crore.

Earlier this month, CNBC-TV18 reported that the Central government has achieved significant savings of ₹10,000 crore in the last year through the PM-KISAN scheme. These savings were primarily the result of eliminating approximately 1.72 crore beneficiaries which were found to be ineligible.

First Published:Oct 30, 2023 4:09 PM IST