The Development, Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), an attached office of NITI Aayog, has invited bids for assessment of the scheme which costs the exchequer R 60,000 crore a year.
A senior government official told ET that the idea to assess the scheme is to evaluate the extent to which the scheme supplemented the financial needs of the farmers, its effect on farm incomes, and to understand if direct benefit transfer is the ideal method of supplementing farmer income by studying international best practices.
“Besides, we plan to evaluate the extent of state-wise enrollment to the scheme and assess the errors of exclusion and inclusion of beneficiaries,” the official said, adding that the time period for schemes’s evaluation will be six months. There were 107.1 million beneficiaries of the scheme in 2022-23.
According to the official, the reference period of the primary component of the study will be from 2020-21 to 2023-24 while the reference period of the secondary study will be from 2017 to 2023-24 to conduct pre and post analysis of the scheme.
PM KISAN is a central sector direct benefit transfer (DBT) Scheme, under which, financial assistance of Rs 6000 per annum is provided to all landholding farmer families across the country, subject to certain exclusion criteria relating to higher income strata, to enable them to take care of expenses related to agriculture and allied activities as well as domestic needs. The amount is transferred in three installments of Rs 2000 each. The government has earmarked Rs 60,000 crore for the scheme in 2024-25, same as the budgeted and revised estimates for the previous financial year.The survey for scheme assessment will cover a minimum of 5000 farmers across 24 states out of which the top 17 states have approximately 95% of PM KISAN beneficiaries.
