Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Tuesday (15 September 2020) informed Lok Sabha that so far, the government has transferred Rs 38,282 crore to farmers under PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana till August this fiscal.
He said there is no proposal to advance the payment of the remaining installments or hike the amount from the current level.
It must be noted that under Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, the Centre provides Rs 6,000 per year in three equal installments to farmers. The money is directly transferred into the bank accounts of farmers through direct benefit transfer (DBT) mode.
Tomar told around 9.24 crore farmer families have been benefited under PM-KISAN yojana.
Regarding corruption in implementation of the scheme, he said the Centre is aware of the recent case of fake PM-Kisan accounts siphoning money meant for beneficiaries in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu.
The minister also said that the Tamil Nadu government had informed that ineligible beneficiaries were enrolled on PM-KISAN website in some districts by stealing the user name credentials.
He said according to PM-KISAN yojana, the whole responsibility of identifying the eligible landholder farmer family is of the state & union territories. The minister added that the Centre has received some complaints of certain eligible beneficiaries not receiving the benefit of this scheme in Maharashtra’s Satara district.
Tomar said 32 villages that comprises 5,964 beneficiaries in Satara disrict faced the issue of non-receipt of benefit under the scheme due to errors in data entry.
But, functionality to correct the locations of beneficiaries on the PM-KISAN website has been provided by National Informatics Centre or NIC. He said the correction activity was started immediately for updating the data of the respective beneficiaries.
The agriculture minister explained that Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana is a continuous & ongoing scheme where the financial benefits are transferred into the bank accounts of identified beneficiaries as & when their accurate and verified data is uploaded by the concerned states or union territories website.
Tomar said the data of beneficiaries so uploaded by them undergoes a multi-level verification & validation by different agencies, including banks, and only then the fund is released into the bank accounts.
