G. Kishore Babu
Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) has one straight connotation that simply means incentivizing the farmers with an assured income which encourages them to boost productivity and helps them earn more. The central government’s vision is to provide for sustained agricultural growth in the long run and not just a one-time sop.
With the DBT, the state is the protector with the IT acting as the facilitator. Direct subsidy to the farmer from the Government, a disruptive idea in the fertiliser field was earlier resisted by the industry, bureaucracy, rubbishing it as non-workable idea.The Government on a pilot basis tried out the direct subsidy plans to farmers in 6 districts of the country, implemented it against all odds and waited for the results, which yielded much better than expected in spite of reservations of many. With this the Government went on in a ‘military mission mode’ to reach the benefits to the poor.This combination put in place by Prime Minister Modi has helped in weeding out fake and duplicate beneficiaries and plugging of leakages getting benefits to reach the poor directly.
The DBT start-up under PM Modi took off to give the Indian farmer,his long deserved rightful dues. The rest is history they say, but for all to know in depth is the aim of this article. Leakages and pilferages in the subsidy system was an industry bleeding the economy across sectors of fertiliser, LPG, kerosene and others costing about One lakh crore loss to the common man. From this money savedby the government, the interim budget provides Rs. 75,000 crore for the present and the next year for giving DBTof Rs. 6000 per year for small and marginal farmers under PM Kisan SammanNidhi for taking care of his costs at the sowing season. This is just the beginning of getting the farmer out of his poverty range and will lead to, as the Prime Minister says, of doubling the farmer’s income soon.
DBT is one of the toughest reforms taken up by PM Moditill nowconsidering the sheer scale of people involved. The problem of improving agriculture income is being tackled right at its roots in helping the farmer. The biggest benefit or take away of DBT is making the countryside digitally literateand be a part of the world’s fourth industrial revolution which is going digitalwith India as a key playerin it.The digital brain thinks originally and comes up with path breaking solutions for all problems.
The Modi Government has moved swiftly to get theAadhaar card issued across the country, on a war footing to millions and bringing them in the ambit of reachability. Itopened about 300 million bank accounts in the country and linked bank accounts with Aadhaar cards thereby creating a network to reach benefits to people across the country.The Government created for the first time such a massive technical framework,with unique identification and bank accountsputting in place a system to transfer money to hundreds of millions of Indians across communities,in recorded history. Moody’s Investor Services says the direct cash transfer programme for farmers and tax relief steps for the middle class will give a fiscal stimulus of about 0.45 per cent of GDP,and support growth through increased consumption. The gigantic scale at which the Modi Government has operated the DBT in the LPG segment is Rs. 96,625 crorethat has been transferred through banks to the poor in the rural and urban areas.
The biggest advantage of the well thought out PM-KISAN offer to the farmer over other schemes is the DBT that will also benefit the tenant farmers in addition to the landowning farm households. As per NSSO survey land tenants constitute 13.7 per cent of the total land holdings and 80 per cent of them own some land, thus the tenant farmers are also eligible and will get the cash transfer of Rs. 6000. This exercise of cash transfer will help in designing a larger scheme of DBT for farmers,combining all subsidies and support for the agriculture sector in the future, protecting the Indian farmer for the first time in independent India.
Database compilation to provide farmers’ data is not a major challenge as most states have already digitised land records and already used the data for debt waivers. The government has asked states to identify beneficiaries giving a broad guideline, which defines a small and marginal farmer as one”comprising of husband,wife and minor children(up to 18 years of age) who collectively own cultivable land up to 2 hectares as per the land records of the concerned state/union territory”. The guidelines say small farmers whose names appear in land records as on February 1, 2019 will only be eligible for the scheme. The database should have name, gender, class, Aadhaar number,bank account and mobile number of the beneficiary. For Transparency, the list of beneficiaries would be displayed in gram panchayats. Soon the integrating cadastral maps,which show the boundaries and ownership of land within an area with Record of Rights (ROR)will be completed. In the Northeast, land is owned by communities. A transparent way will be found later to handle this situation on keeping all stake holders in the loop.
The savings because of DBT calculated on basis of total outlay as per existing status quo and the actual expenditure for the real beneficiaries is a staggering Rs. 1.10 lakh crore(cumulative since inception December 2018).This covers DBT toseven main heads/categories of schemes PAHAL(LPG cylinders), PDS (Food),MGNREGS (Employment Guarantee), NSAP (Social Assistance), Scholarship for minorities, Scholarship for SC/ST/OBC, Supplementary Nutrition Program of Anganwadi services and some more schemes. In the last full fiscal year saving was Rs. 33,000 crore. This time for the first nine months of the current fiscal year, it is already Rs. 19,970.57 crore, a huge improvement over the previous year.
India has about 14.6 crore farmers and about 86.2% are small and marginal farmers with land holdings less than two hectares who will be beneficiaries.
Today as many as 437 schemes administered by 55 ministries are under DBT, the core of the DBT isJanDhan bank accounts, 33 crore have been opened with123 croreAadhaar cards issued and 100 crore mobile connections,with the world’s lowest cost of data usage.
Today DBT has become a way of life for all Indians in a short period of four and half years. Keeping this aspect in mind, the PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana (PMKSNY) the DBT programme for farmers in the 2019 Budget is considered as a milestone and the beginning of the universal basic income (UBI) that is incorporated in the Economic survey 2016-17.
This Indian DBT is a unique financial model that can be adopted in other developing countries.
(World Focus)
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