View: Don't deride PM-KISAN yet, data shows it will help rural India's poorest

 

The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme will transfer annually Rs 6,000 to every small and marginal farmer. Many in the Opposition have criticised the scheme, arguing that it offers too little to be of real help to farmers. Congress president Rahul Gandhi went as far as describing the scheme as “an insult to everything [farmers] stand and work for”.

This denunciation is largely political. When in power, the UPA government had put in place a subsidy under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) that was roughly equal to the transfer under PM-KISAN on a per-beneficiary basis. One may rhetorically ask, was this subsidy, too, an insult to its beneficiaries?

To those steeped in the elite culture of Lutyens’ Delhi, almost any transfer that is feasible within India’s tight fiscal constraints appears laughably low. We are reminded of the acrimonious debate on the Tendulkar poverty line in 2011. One commentator had argued then that at this poverty line, he could not even buy two bananas per meal in Delhi’s Jor Bagh. Had the commentator checked the basket of goods that poverty-line households actually bought, he may have argued his case differently.