On February 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the 13th instalment of the PM-KISAN (Pradhan Mantri Kissan Samman Nidhi) scheme. Pegged at Rs 16,000 crore, the PM declared that every single penny of this amount will be transferred to the bank accounts of crores of farmers. He contrasted this with the scenarios during the terms of the previous governments and claimed that back then, hardly 20% of the funds released were used to reach the ultimate beneficiaries. It was obvious that the PM was taking a dig at the famous statement made by Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress government. However, the credit, if any, for the zero pilferage in the Direct Beneficiary Transfer (DBT) schemes should go to technology rather than the administration or the government, and employing such technology started long before the Modi government.
But the irony is that like the previous governments, even the Modi government uses the technology-enabled DBTs to exclude real beneficiaries and as a first step towards closing the welfare schemes altogether. Here, one must also remember what happened to the DBT of cooking gas subsidies in the last few years!
But unlike the previous governments, the Modi-led BJP and RSS, and their propaganda ecosystem within and outside the government, has developed a dubious system of creating an environment where people and the nation would be declared beneficiaries without actually providing benefits. Questioning the same would later amount to sedition and the like.
The PM-KISAN scheme is the best example of this fallacy.
The PM-KISAN scheme was announced by the Modi government in the interim budget on February 1, 2019, just a few months before the 2019 general elections. This was envisaged as an income support scheme for farmers owning up to 2 hectares of land under which the beneficiary would receive a sum of Rs 6,000 annually, in three equal instalments of Rs 2,000 each. There was a context to this well-calculated move by the Modi government.
During the entirety of 2018, the year before the impending general elections in 2019, the Modi government faced a backlash from farmers and tribals all over India. There was a firing in Mandsur in Madhya Pradesh on the agitating farmers by the ruling BJP government. Subsequently, the BJP lost Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in the state elections. All this pressurised the BJP government to immediately portray itself in a pro-farmer image. This dire need for an image makeover resulted in the PM-KISAN scheme.
But the Pulwama terrorist attack on the soldiers, and the subsequent Balakot revenge attack by India, changed the whole narrative of the ongoing elections in favour of the BJP and Modi, as the BJP-RSS were successful in convincing the nation about the need for a strong security state and an authoritarian leader.
Though in the beginning, the PM- KISAN scheme was restricted to farmers owning up to two hectares of land, it was relaxed to include all farmers. But a different, exclusionary criterion was later evolved, based on the income limit. Even this grand announcement did not include the agricultural workers and the tenants, who constitute a major chunk of the rural population.
Despite this, the PM-KISAN scheme is repeatedly cited by the Modi government as proof of its commitment to farmers. A closer study of the subsequent budget allocation to the scheme exposes its hypocrisy.
According to the 2015 agricultural census, there are 14.5 crore agricultural holdings in the country, out of which 85% (12.5 crore) are holdings below two hectares of land. The governments equate the number of holdings with the number of farmers and declare that all the 14.5 crore of farming families would get Rs 6,000. A simple mathematical understanding would suggest that to provide Rs 6,000 annually to 14.5 crore families, a budgetary allocation of Rs 87,000 crore is required. Even if this number is restricted to just 12.5 crore small and marginal holdings, an amount of Rs 75,000 crore is required. But these are the budget allocations for the scheme in the subsequent years.
In 2019-20 even though the budget estimate allotted Rs 75,000 crore to the scheme, the actual expenditure made by the government on PM-KISAN was just Rs 48,714 crore. During the year 2020-21, the budget estimate was Rs 75,000 crore, but the actual expenditure was just Rs 60,990 crore. In 2021-22, the budget estimation itself was reduced from Rs 75,000 crore to Rs 65,000 crore, and in the 2023-24 budget, the estimation for the scheme was further reduced to Rs 60,000 crore.
Thus, even though the Modi government made a pompous claim of providing income support of Rs 6,000 to 14.5 crore farmers, the budgetary allocation, leave alone actual expenditure, could not even cover all the eligible farmers owning below two hectares of land.
According to a written reply provided by the Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare to a question asked in the Lok Sabha on February 7, 2023, among the 12 instalments of PM-KISAN that have been distributed hitherto, the highest number of beneficiaries was in the 11th instalment, at 10.45 crore. This number immediately collapsed to 8.55 crore in the 12th instalment. The 13th instalment released by the PM is Rs 16,000 crore. As Rs 2,000 per beneficiary is provided, the beneficiaries of the 13th instalment would be only 8 crore, 55 lakh less than the 12th instalment.
Thus, the actual beneficiaries of PM-KISAN have never gone beyond 60% of the 12.5 crore farmers owning up to two hectares of land, leave alone the entire farming community of 14.5 crore. But does the 11th instalment, which shows the highest number of beneficiaries at 10.45 crore, reflect the reality?
The 11th instalment of PM-KISAN was disbursed during May-June of 2022. Activist Kanhaih Kumar made a query under the RTI about the beneficiaries of the 11th instalment in September 2022, and the reply was at best, shocking.
In fact, in the 11th instalment, there was a dip of more than 67% in the number of beneficiaries, compared to the previous instalment. A report in The Hindu based on the RTI reply explains that in the 11th instalment, the number of beneficiaries was just 3.87 crore.
Though the GOI (Government of India) gave an immediate rejoinder explaining the process of identifying the beneficiaries, it did not give any explanations for the numbers given in the RTI reply by the very same Ministry. Later, the number of beneficiaries of the 11th instalment was magically increased to 10.45 crore in the official records!
A few more magic tricks and manipulations can be found in the reply given by the Ministry in Lok Sabha. Even though the Ministry claims that the number of beneficiaries is dynamic in nature, this dynamism follows a pattern.
The pattern is this: whenever there is an election due in a state, the number of beneficiaries of the scheme in that state swell in the previous instalments prior to the election, and steeply decrease after the elections!
Consider these examples:
Thus, the above examples amply prove that the PM-KISAN scheme is being used by the Modi government as a bribe to voters prior to elections and that the Modi government has been misusing a state fund of Rs 60,000 crore for the partisan purposes of the BJP.
The media eco-system of the BJP-RSS exaggerates the intention behind the PM-KISAN, which is not all reflected in the budgetary allocations. It does not even enquire about the delivery of the scheme, which proves to be abysmally low and skewed towards the BJP's electoral interests.
The budget for 2023-24 has made it amply clear that the Modi government is aggressively implementing a neo-liberal fiscal policy which entails further cuts in welfare and social security expenditures. To achieve the same, the BJP government is using technology and processes as an instrument of exclusion, where filling up of e-KYC, Aadhaar, and electronically verified land and residential documents are being made compulsory. This would automatically exclude lakhs and lakhs of eligible beneficiaries, which would serve the neo-liberal purposes of the government.
Thus, even in the pre-election budget, the Modi government had the audacity to scuttle allocations for rural and farmers' welfare schemes like the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), PM-KISAN, and PMFBY (Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana), among others. It reflects the confidence the party has in its capacity to rule by lies and propaganda.
The way the PM-KISAN is used by the Modi government is thus, a classic example of the rule of a neo-liberal regime, legitimised by a systemic, mythic factory.
The author is an activist and freelance journalist. Views expressed are the author’s own.