The Tamil Nadu government has already taken the required corrective and punitive action in the matter relating to allegations of wrongful selection of beneficiaries in the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM Kisan) scheme in the State, the Centre informed the Lok Sabha on Sunday.
In his reply to a query raised by Congress MP S. Jothimani (Karur), Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar said: “Reports of a wrongful selection of beneficiaries in Tamil Nadu and corrective action taken thereon by the State government were received. As selection/identification of beneficiaries is the responsibility of the State government alone, the government of Tamil Nadu has already taken the required corrective and punitive action in the matter.”
Under the PM Kisan scheme, all landholding small, marginal and other farmers are eligible for benefits, subject to certain exclusion criteria, relating to the higher-income strata. Every beneficiary gets ₹2,000 every four months.
The responsibility of identification of the beneficiaries is “entirely with the State/U.T. governments” as per provisions of the scheme. “Financial benefits are transferred to the bank accounts of the identified beneficiaries as and when their correct and verified data is uploaded by the concerned States/U.T.s on the PM Kisan web portal.”
“Data of the beneficiaries, so uploaded by them, undergoes multi-level verification and validation by various agencies concerned, including banks, and only then is the amount released into the bank accounts of the beneficiaries,” he said.
Data of the beneficiaries is verified at the time of releasing every instalment, to exclude errors or changes in the status of eligibility of the beneficiaries. “Further, as per the operational guidelines, verification of 5% of the beneficiaries, on a random basis, is carried out every year, to ensure their genuineness. There is no provision for monitoring of the scheme under DISHA,” he added.
