Bhubaneswar: Agriculture & Farmers’ Empowerment Minister Arun Kumar Sahoo today sought the intervention of Union Petroleum & Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for acceptance of constructive suggestions given by the technical team of the Odisha government, especially in the matter of allowing full data access to Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana (PM-KISAN) portal, in the best common interest for improving farmers’ welfare leading to doubling of farmers income.
Sahoo wrote a letter to Pradhan seeking his intervention in the matter while appreciating the latter’s desire to ensure that more farmers from Odisha receive support under PM KISAN.
The Agriculture & Farmers’ Empowerment Minister has clarified that the total beneficiaries registered by Odisha on the PM-KISAN portal is 43.77 lakhs (and not 40.5 Lakhs).
Based on the number of potential formers indicated by the Government of India this translates to a saturation level of 83.5% which is much higher than the national saturation level, he added.
Sahoo has pointed out that however, against the 43.17 lakh registered farmers, only 38.65 lakh farmers have been approved for receiving benefits.
“We seek your kind intervention in ensuring that the balance 4.52 lakh farmers are also considered for support under PM-KISAN,” Sahoo has stated in the letter.
While stating that out of the 38.65 lakh registered farmers accepted for receiving benefits, 37.19 lakh farmers (96.22%) have received one or more installments, the Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment Minister has pointed out, “In fact, this is precisely the issue that the State Government has been taking up with the Government of India over the past year to understand the reasons for registered farmers being accepted for receiving one installment under the PM-KISAN SAMMAN NIDHI YOJANA but not being accepted for receiving subsequent installments”.
Sahoo has stated that on continuous contact, some of the reasons mentioned by the PM KISAN technical team for disbursement of assistance being reduced are due to different factors, like delays in lot opening, transaction failures, non-integration of banks with PFMS, rejection of beneficiaries with discrepancies in Aadhaar name and registered former name, changes in LGD codes, low level of automation in some bonks, and non-receipt of payment success information from banks, amongst others.
Agriculture & Farmers’ Empowerment Minister has said that even though the entire data of the registered farmers on the PM-KISAN Portal is uploaded by the State Government only very limited access to the Portal is being given to the State Government.
Thus, issues like bulk bank details correction and bulk rectification is not possible to be done by the State Government, he clarified.
In absence of access to the portal, Odisha has requested a complete dump of the data and facility for bulk rectification of records, he added.
“I would urge you to impress upon the team handling PM-KISAN to give full administrative and editing rights to the State Government so that they can rectify any discrepancies,” Sahoo wrote.
Reminding the Union Minister that Odisha has implemented an inclusive scheme for farmers and landless agricultural labourers since 2018 – Krushak Assistance for Livelihoods and Income Augmentation (KALIA) Sahoo has informed that under this scheme, the State government has released in February 2021, an installment to 53.55 lakh eligible beneficiaries, with a negligible failure rate of 0.8% due to the innovative approaches used in KALIA data sanitization.
He informed Pradhan that the technical team of the Government of Odisha has been working closely with the technical team of PM-KISAN and substantial progress has been made and around 2.77 lakh mismatches of the Aadhaar name / Aadhaar numbers has been corrected, 66,662 transaction failures have been rectified and 9.77 lakh farmers whose payments had been stopped for different reasons, the stop payment has been revoked.
“I hope all the pending issues are resolved by the PM KISAN technical team, with our support, by March. 31, 2021,” he added.