Over 1 lakh farmers voluntarily gave up their PM-Kisan benefits last year

Sources said the Agriculture Ministry had introduced a module in the PM-Kisan mobile app and website last year which enables farmers to voluntarily exit the scheme.

Officials said the possible reasons for some farmers giving up the PM-Kisan benefits include: absentee landlords who may have decided against availing of the subsidy; land going to tax-paying descendants who are not eligible; change in status of land-owners.

As per details available on the PM-Kisan portal, farmers willing to surrender their benefits are required to enter their registration number. After that, they can generate an OTP that will be sent to their Aadhar-registered mobile number. Through this process, the PM-Kisan beneficiary is identified. Thereafter, the beneficiary can surrender her benefits.

Under the PM-Kisan scheme, eligible farmer families receive Rs 6,000 per annum in three equated instalments through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) every four months. The scheme was launched on February 24, 2019, just before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. At the time of the first instalment in December-March 2018-19 (since the four-month cycle started from December 2018), the number of beneficiaries stood at 3.03 crore. The PM-Kisan is a Central Sector scheme with 100% funding from the Centre. The fund is directly transferred to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries.

As of now, 16 instalments of the PM-Kisan have been released to farmers. The 16th instalment was transferred to the bank accounts of 9.09 crore farmers by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Yavatmal in Maharashtra on February 29 this year. The 17th instalment for the period (April-July 2024) is due and may be released anytime soon after the new government is sworn, the source said.

Of the 9.09 crore farmers who received the 16th instalment of PM-Kisan, a maximum of 2.03 crore were in Uttar Pradesh, and the state was followed by Maharashtra (89.66 lakh), Madhya Pradesh (79.93 lakh), Bihar (75.79 lakh) and Rajasthan (62.66 lakh).

Incidentally, the Centre and states weeded out many ineligible farmers from the PM-Kisan database — after this drive, the number of beneficiaries dropped to 8.12 crore in November 2023 from a peak of 10.47 crore in April-July 2022.