PM-KISAN scheme: India to verify and digitally enrol farmers, new app to help build farmer registries

According to CNBC-TV18, the Centre has launched an aggressive saturation push to secure the inclusion of all eligible farmers in the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme. Farmers have complained about exclusion from the PM-KISAN initiative, which aims to provide financial assistance to land-owning farmers across India. In response, the government is taking actual steps to authenticate and enroll farmers online.

"Farmers continue to express their dissatisfaction with their non-inclusion in the scheme." This is primarily due to two factors. One, the farmer's land details are not in accordance with the state's land record system, and two, the farmer's e-KYC has not been completed. Under these conditions, there is still room to expand the PM-KISAN scheme to include additional beneficiaries," sources told CNBC-TV18.

However, due to different exclusion criteria stated in the operational guidelines, the scheme may never attain 100% saturation of land owners, according to sources.

"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 were quoted as saying by CNBC-TV18.

According to sources, the development of the PM-KISAN Mobile App, which will allow farmers to register digitally and also help construct comprehensive farmer registrations in states, is one of the cornerstones of this effort.

According to reports, the farmer's agreement via e-sign (Aadhaar-based) and e-KYC will only be obtained as part of the registration and verification procedure, and the e-KYC will be carried out by a face or an OTP process. There are also plans to make fingerprint-based (biometric) authentication available through the app. All e-KYC/authentication and verification of farmer's lands requirements would be met digitally, allowing for quick verification and membership in PM-KISAN. According to CNBCTV18, as part of this procedure, a farmer's registration will be established for states to use in the future.

These state-specific farmer registries will be used for a variety of purposes, including enabling access to crop loans, distributing Kisan Credit Cards (KCC), and procuring agricultural commodities at Minimum Support Prices (MSP), among others.

The saturation drive will first be tested in seven states. With state elections approaching, the Centre intends to expand the PM-KISAN saturation push across the entire country.

It is worth mentioning that there is a huge disparity between the existing PM-KISAN database and the number of land-owning farmers in India. While there are roughly 9.5 crore land-owning farmers in the country, PM-KISAN's data set only includes 8.75 crore.

CNBC-TV18 claimed earlier this month that the Central government saved Rs 10,000 crore in the last year through the PM-KISAN initiative. These savings were mostly achieved by removing around 1.72 crore beneficiaries who were deemed to be ineligible.