Agri dept to weed out all ineligible beneficiaries from PM Kisan scheme
To Trace Frauds With Aadhaar, Bank Details
Team TOI
Chennai:09.09.2020
The state agriculture department has drafted its entire machinery to do complete verification of PM Kisan Scheme beneficiaries in Tamil Nadu to weed out all ineligible beneficiaries from the list before the next instalment of ₹2,000 per small and marginal farmer family – the seventh instalment of the dole – is disbursed in December, said state agriculture secretary Gagandeep Singh Bedi. As Aadhaar and bank account details of all the fake beneficiaries are available with the government, none can escape from the probe, he said.
He said 10 teams headed by directors of agriculture and horticulture were carrying out departmental inquiries to identify ineligible beneficiaries and officials who had assisted them in the fraud. “We are zero-tolerant to misuse of government welfare schemes. Action will be taken against all those who are involved in the fraud. We are waiting for the final report from the probe teams,” he said. The departmental probe is in addition to the CB-CID inquiry that is underway.
Bank accounts of about 5 lakh fraudulent claimants have been frozen so far, he said. The state, as of March, had 39 lakh eligible farmers enrolled under the scheme, he said. Inquiries have revealed that around six lakh ineligible people had enrolled in the PM-Kisan Scheme portal in August alone, using the passwords of agricultural department officials. Of them, five lakh entries were from northern districts and the rest were mostly from western districts. About 11,000 fake entries have been detected in Madurai district and 4,800 in Tiruvarur and Karur districts. Fraudulent entries have been reported in Villupuram, Cuddalore, Kallakurichi, Tiruvannamalai, Vellore, Ranipet, Tiruppattur, Salem, Dharmapuri, Coimbatore, Chengelpet and Chennai districts also.
Cuddalore collector Chandrashekhar Sakhamurai said 70,709 ineligible beneficiaries had siphoned off ₹14 crore in the district, of which, ₹5 crore has been recovered.
More than 42,000 ineligible beneficiaries have been identified so far in Villupuram district and ₹5 crore has been recovered from their accounts. In Kallakurichi district, two lakh ineligible beneficiaries have been identified and ₹7.3 crore has been recovered from them. Seven people have been arrested from Kallakurichi district.
The PM Kisan Scheme, during its initial one year of existence, could not have been widely misused as the list of beneficiaries – small and marginal farmer families with land holding up to 2 hectares – were identified by a team of agriculture and horticulture officials under the guidance of district collectors. Their documents were validated before enrolling them as beneficiaries, he said. However, later, the Centre allowed left out farmers to upload their data online and allowed block-level officials to validate them. Internet cafes came into play at this stage. Many officials, it is learnt, gave their passwords to internet café owners to do the validation. They misused it as a business opportunity and enrolled multiple people from same family and also faked land records for landless applicants, all for benefits ranging from ₹500-₹1,000 per applicant. As a result, people from Cuddalore and Kallakurichi district got enrolled in Salem district and vice versa. As it developed into a mega syndicate in the last two months, it came under the watchful eyes of some diligent officials, who found an abnormal increase in PM Kisan Scheme applications.
Under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, popularly known as PM-Kisan Scheme, launched in December 2018, the Centre gives financial assistance of ₹6,000 per year to small and marginal farmer families. Under the scheme, the Centre had disbursed ₹2,459 crore to Tamil Nadu farmers till January 30, 2020, as per a reply given by Union minister of agriculture and farmers’ welfare, Narendra Singh Tomar in the Lok Sabha in February.
