PM-KISAN

Imagine a government scheme with no paperwork about what crop you grew, no requirement that the government buy anything from you, and no loan involved. It simply deposits cash into your bank account, three times a year, just because you are a farmer who owns land.

That is PM-KISAN, short for Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi.

PM-KISAN gives Rs 6,000 every year to every eligible landholding farmer family. It arrives in three equal instalments, paid directly into the farmer's bank account. This uses the same Direct Benefit Transfer system that the government uses for other welfare payments, explained elsewhere on this site, a method built to make sure the money reaches people directly, with very little of it lost along the way to middlemen or paperwork delays.

The scale of this scheme is huge. Since it launched, the government has transferred roughly Rs 3.70 lakh crore across 20 instalments to more than 11 crore farmers. That makes it one of the largest direct cash transfer programmes in the entire world, by both the amount of money and the number of people it reaches.

PM-KISAN works very differently from MSP, the guaranteed crop price explained elsewhere on this site. MSP only helps a farmer if their specific crop is actually bought by the government at that price. PM-KISAN pays out no matter what the farmer grows, sells, or whether the government buys anything at all. The two schemes are not competing with each other. They support farmers in different ways, and are meant to work together.

Whenever India's total spending on farmer welfare is discussed, PM-KISAN's total payout is usually one of the biggest numbers mentioned. That is because it reaches almost every landholding farming family in the country, and because its design is deliberately simple: no conditions, no procurement needed, just direct cash.