As per a reply to RTI filed by transparency activist Venkatesh Nayak, the state of Punjab has the highest number of ineligible farmers enrolled under the PM-KISAN scheme. As per the reply by the government, Punjab has the highest, 4.74 lakh farmers, who are ineligible for the scheme but are benefiting from it. The Union Government lost 323.85 crore rupees due to ineligible farmers from Punjab getting thousands of rupees directly in their bank accounts under the scheme.
Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sammann Nidhi was launched by the Modi government in 2019 to increase farmer’s income and to deliver the promise of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. Under the scheme, more than 14 crore farmers of the country are paid 6,000 rupees annually, directly in their bank accounts.
Among the states with the highest number of ineligible beneficiaries, Punjab is followed by Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, where a large number of ineligible farmers are benefiting under the scheme. However, given the fact Punjab has the lowest population- around 3 crore- among these states, thus, the lowest number of farmers, the state topping the chart shows the scale of corruption.
The Amarinder Singh government enrolled a large number of ineligible farmers under the scheme because the Modi government trusted the state agencies for the enrollment purpose. As per the RTI reply, a total of 20.48 lakh ineligible farmers received money under the PM-KISAN scheme, and this cost the union exchequer 1,364 crore rupees.
As per the reply, around 19.85 per cent and one out of every five farmers receiving the benefits of the scheme is actually ineligible. A large number of people from Punjab who are ‘Income Tax Payee’ are receiving the benefits of the PM-KISAN scheme despite being ineligible. People with an income of more than 5 lakh annually have lined up to receive 6,000 rupees per month in the state of Punjab.
The Union Government said that it will recover the money from all ineligible beneficiaries in the coming months. The farmers from the state of Punjab and Haryana benefit most from the input and output subsidies provided by the Union Government but the Punjab government is still enrolling a large number of ineligible farmers, and, more importantly, even the people who earn in lakhs are ready to get enrolled.
The Union Government subsidises agricultural on input front (seed subsidy, fertiliser subsidy, subsidised credit, and power subsidy) as well as output front (MSP, investment in Agricultural marketing and so on). The majority of these subsidies go to Punjab and Haryana.
Around 80 per cent of the Union Government’s total procurement consists of Wheat (37 per cent) and Rice (43 per cent), and around 70 per cent of the total wheat and rice procurement is done from Punjab and Haryana only because these states have a sophisticated APMC network. In the last five decades, the farmers of Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh got billions of dollars from the Union Government in the form of subsidies.
Punjab and Haryana started growing paddy despite the fact the crop is more suited to Eastern India (it needs a lot of water) because the union and state governments were giving various kinds of subsidies. Groundwater was exploited more because power was free, seeds were purchased given the subsidy, fertilisers were purchased to grow the crops because they were heavily subsidised, and later the Union Government was ready to purchase rice produced in these states at a subsidised price.
So, the production of paddy which should have risen in Eastern UP, Bihar, and West Bengal, given the suitable conditions, was being produced more in Punjab, thanks to subsidies by the Union Government and discriminatory procurement practices by the Food Corporation of India.
As of FY 20, the Union Government spends around 3 lakh crore rupees of the taxpayer’s money on Agricultural subsidies (input+output), the majority of which goes to Punjab and Haryana. This money, or a part of this money, should have gone to poor states like Bihar for the betterment of the agrarian sectors, but rich states like Punjab are surely growing at the cost of Bihar. The state government and a large number of corrupt farmers of Punjab are colluding to squeeze the Union Government.