The Telangana government will shortly take a policy decision on facilitating encashment of cheques by farmers in absentia, including NRIs, under Rytu Bandhu scheme of investment support for agriculture as they were supposed to be ‘order cheques’ payable only to persons named on the instruments.
The agriculture department has assessed that 60,000 to 70,000 farmers out of eight lakh farmers who have not collected their cheques for various reasons after the launch of the programme on May 10 are NRIs.
As the programme envisaged that the benefit would be extended only to genuine farmers by handing over the cheques to them in person, the government had virtually shut the doors on ‘proxies’ or ‘authorised’ persons of the beneficiaries. So, this left a huge backlog of cheques for eight lakh farmers. And one category of people among them was NRIs settled abroad who either did agriculture in the State as absent landlords or left their holdings fallow.
Since a separate mechanism to let farmers who could not collect the cheques in person was required, the government decided to take a view on it after completing the process of handing over the instruments to available persons. The absent land owners, particularly NRIs, were in any case not the priority of the government as they were moneyed class.
Meanwhile, the government focussed on launch of life insurance cover of ₹5 lakh for farmers under Rytu Beema from August 15. To date, it has contacted 36.82 lakh farmers and collected nomination forms from 26.21 lakh farmers. It was found that the remaining 10.60 lakh farmers were ineligible to avail the scheme.
Principal Agriculture Secretary C. Parthasarathi has said that 90% of ineligible farmers were above 59 years, the upper age limit for the scheme, while the remaining 10% farmers held multiple pattadar passbooks by virtue of their land holdings at different places. The norms stipulated that only one policy document can be issued per farmer per holding.
The number of ineligible farmers was the highest in Nalgonda where 1.17 lakh out of 2.99 lakh people contacted were left out.
