What is the PM KISAN scheme?

The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM KISAN) is a Central Sector Scheme through which an income support of ₹6000 per year is given to small and marginal farmers in 3 equal instalments.

The PM KISAN scheme is a Central Sector Scheme i.e., the complete expenditure for the scheme is borne by the Government of India.

Who are eligible?

Small and marginal farmer family having a combined land holding or ownership upto 2 hectares are eligible for the scheme. The beneficiaries are identified by the respective State and Union Territory governments.

While a family may have four individual adults each of them owning a separate farm land, only one member will be eligible to get enrolled under the scheme.

Who are not eligible?

Farmer families with professionals like doctors, engineers, lawyers, chartered accountants and architects, registered with professional bodies and carrying out profession by undertaking practices, income tax payers, present and retired employees of State or Central government, institutional landholders, farmer families with former or present constitutional post holders, retired pensioners with monthly pensions of ₹10,000 and above

What is the issue?

About 5 lakh ineligible people from Tamil Nadu have been enrolled under the scheme leading to the siphoning off of around ₹110 crore from the exchequer.

Many of these ineligible people were reportedly enrolled as beneficiaries during the lockdown period.

Chengalpet, Cuddalore, Dharmapuri, Kallakurichi, Krishnagiri, Ranipet, Salem, Tiruvannamalai, Vellore, and Villupuram, were the districts where most of these ineligible people were added from.

The scam was first detected when the District Collector of Cuddalore found more than 100 people who are not farmers receiving the PM KISAN aid. These people were not aware of them being added to the scheme. The alarm bells were sounded when the total beneficiaries saw a dramatic increase from 39 lakh to 45 lakh by August.

How did it happen?

The Centre had introduced an online provision for self-registration where prospective beneficiaries can register for the scheme by furnishing the necessary proofs. This provision was used by the scamsters comprising of few Agriculture Department officials and private computer centres.

The reason for the scam is said to be fulfilment of targets. It was reported that the officials had on-boarded temporary contractual staff to fill unsuspecting people as beneficiaries.

These department officials are said to be not tech-savvy and had to rely on data entry operators in the computer centres. The computer centres had used the Aadhar details of the people in the locality that was collected during earlier occasions. Soon, agents started showing up in villages collecting the Aadhar card details.

Every district has a unique password which is given to the joint director, deputy directors and assistant directors in the agriculture department which cannot be changed. Either the passwords must have been stolen or the officials must have colluded.

The officials supposedly shared the login id and password with these computer centres who added the new beneficiaries and received about ₹2000 as commission per beneficiary.

One of the agents from Salem reportedly added 160 people another one added while another one added 50. Salem, the native district of CM Palaniswami, alone had more than 10,000 fake entries.

As the field officers of the department were occupied with providing other immediate requirement of farmers, there was laxity in verification exercises.

The discrepancy in land data is also considered as one of the factor. According to the Agricultural Census 2015-16, there are 79.38 lakh farm holdings, regarded as farmers. However, the State Agriculture Department notes the total number of farmer-beneficiaries are at an estimated at 41 lakh.

What has been done so far?

Principal Secretary and Agricultural Production Commissioner Gagandeep Singh Bedi had said that 80 contractual employees were dismissed and 34 officials of the department suspended. 18 people identified as brokers who are mostly internet café owners have been arrested.

A CB-CID probe has been launched into the matter owing to the magnitude of the fraud. While action has been taken against the government officials for dereliction of duty, Mr. Bedi has assured that if anyone was found to have connived with the brokers, criminal action would be initiated against them which would be known as the probe progresses.

The government has reportedly retrieved ₹32 crores of the ₹110 crores. District Collectors have issued orders to banks to freeze the accounts of the ineligible beneficiaries and create a conduit to recover the balance money when it gets deposited to their accounts.

Mr. Bedi has spoken to Chairman of SBI and other public sector banks to speed up the recovery process.

The politics

As the scam came to light senior leaders of BJP Tamil Nadu submitted a petition to the Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu K Shanmugam. The BJP Tamil Nadu’s IT Wing president CTR Nirmal Kumar alleged that a scam of such magnitude would not have been possible without the involvement of top politicians.

While at present there are no prima facie involvement of top politicians in the scam, role of local politicians are not being ruled out.

The DMK President MK Stalin grabbed the opportunity to blame both the Centre and State alleging that both the governments were hand-in-glove.

Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami under whose watch the scam has surfaced though admitted about the irregularities, sought to blame the Centre’s self-registration process while staying silent on failure of state officials to verify the beneficiaries.

The CM has assured that the CB-CID probe would take its course and all perpetrators would be brought to books.