NEW DELHI: The
West Bengal government
has finally agreed to implement the Centre’s flagship ‘income support’ scheme for
farmers
—
PM-Kisan
— but with a rider. Chief minister
Mamata Banerjee has demanded that the money be transferred to the state exchequer.
But the Centre has made it clear that it would not tweak its rule of direct transfer to farmers’ bank accounts under the scheme.
“We would like to follow the same rule for West Bengal which we have been following for all the states since February last year. Money is meant to be transferred directly to the farmers’ bank accounts. We’ll stick to this rule,” said an official in the agriculture ministry which has been implementing the scheme.
After denying nearly 72 lakh of its farmers the benefit of the scheme for over 18 months, the
West Bengal CM
had on September 9 written to agriculture minister
Narendra Singh Tomar expressing her wish to implement PM-Kisan in her state.
She said the state government would be happy to provide benefits to farmers under the PM-Kisan scheme and in that case, the central government may transfer the requisite fund directly to the state government for “further disbursement with full responsibility to the beneficiaries through the state government machinery”.
Under the fully-funded central scheme launched in February last year, Rs 6,000 per year is provided to each landholder farmer’s family in three equal instalments. State governments and UT administration identify the farmer families. All states and UTs, except West Bengal, have joined the scheme.
The fund is directly transferred to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries. Payment is done on the basis of Aadhaar -seeded data of beneficiaries, except for the state/UTs of Assam,
Meghalaya
, J&K and
Ladakh
, which have been given exemption in this regard up to March 31, 2021.
Stay updated with the latest news on Times of India. Don't miss daily games like Crossword, Sudoku, Location Guesser and Mini Crossword. Vishwa Mohan is Senior Editor at The Times of India. He writes on...
Read MoreVishwa Mohan is Senior Editor at The Times of India. He writes on environment, climate change, agriculture, water resources and clean energy, tracking policy issues and climate diplomacy. He has been covering Parliament since 2003 to see how politics shaped up domestic policy and India’s position at global platform. Before switching over to explore sustainable development issues, Vishwa had covered internal security and investigative agencies for more than a decade.
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