New Delhi: With just 10 days to go for the first payout deadline under PM-KISAN, only 2.74 crore farm families, or about 56% of the total list of 4.92 crore names submitted by States, have been paid so far. The remaining 2.18 crore farm families are still awaiting processing or are caught somewhere within a four-stage validation process set up belatedly to weed out fakes.
The scheme to pay Rs. 6,000 per year to small farming families was introduced less than a month before the announcement of the Lok Sabha polls, and the first instalment of Rs. 2,000 is to be paid by March 31.
“These checks and balances were built as we implemented the scheme; it’s not like they were thought of in advance,” said a senior official from the Agriculture Ministry, which is coordinating with the States to roll out the scheme at a breakneck pace. “The four-stage validation came into the picture because we found discrepancies in the names after the first set of beneficiaries,” added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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