Farmers can now register themselves for PM-Kisan

The government has opened the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) portal for self-registration by farmers this week, but farmers from West Bengal, the State that has refused to implement the scheme, will still not benefit from the move as the task of vetting the registrations lies with State authorities, sources in the Agriculture Ministry said on Wednesday.

Participating in a conference last week, PM-Kisan CEO and Joint Secretary in the Agriculture Ministry, Vivek Aggarwal said the PM-Kisan portal would be made public this week. Farmers who have not been enrolled can use the opportunity to register themselves. Besides, the enrolled farmers can access the portal to check by themselves about disbursements made to their accounts while others whose names were registered but haven’t started getting the instalments can carry out minor corrections that are holding back the disbursement.

But this will not help farmers from West Bengal, whose numbers are estimated to be around 68 lakh. Farmers from the State may be able to register on the portal, but their names need to be cleared by the State administration to make them eligible for the PM-Kisan scheme, said the sources. Unless, of course, a decision is taken at the highest political level to give West Bengal farmers their due.

Bengal farmers left out

According to the sources, thousands of farmers from West Bengal have already sent their applications directly to the Centre, hoping that they would still be able to get ₹6,000 a year, which the government has promised to give farmers in the country as input subsidy, even though the Mamata Banerjee government is yet to implement the scheme.

Allowing self-enrolment, on the other hand, is expected to help farmers in other States whose names have been missed out. Many States have been slow in enrolling farmers for various reasons.

So far 8.5 crore Indian farmers have been enrolled, even though it is estimated that there are around 14.5 crore landholding farmers in the country. According to Aggarwal, as many as 12 States and Union Territories have been able to enrol less than 50 per cent of farmers.

Among the States where the enrolment is less than half are Madhya Pradesh (49 per cent), Tamil Nadu (47 per cent), Kerala (40 per cent) and Bihar (26 per cent). The latest drive is aimed at increasing the saturation as the government feels that a large number of farmers are missing out on benefits that are rightfully theirs, the sources added.

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