Double trouble

The Union government's claim about being on track to double farmers' income sounds hollow as it has not even spent the allocated budget for agrarian schemes in three of the past five years

- RAJIT SENGUPTA

ON FEBRUARY 28, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to double farmers' income by 2022-23-his gift to the country in its 75th year of independence. In the six years since then, the Union government has not given the most basic figures on how much farmers earned in 2016 and how much they earn now, making it impossible to know whether the farmers' incomes have doubled.

Instead, ministers and officials have made a range of statements in the past two years on the issue. In 2021, Ramesh Chand, a member of the government's think tank NITI Aayog, admitted that the target would not be met because of the repealing of three farm laws passed by Parliament in September 2020; the laws, feared to encourage corporatisation of agriculture, had triggered nationwide protests. In contrast to Chand's statement, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar, during the 2022 Budget session of Parliament, listed the 17 schemes initiated by the Centre and said that in the absence of income data, monitoring the performance of these schemes was enough to prove that the goal of doubling farmers' income was within easy reach. "The progress made so far indicates that we are on the right track," Tomar said. Data, however, makes this assertion doubtful.

In three of the past five years, the Union agriculture ministry has spent less than what it had budgeted for centrally sponsored agriculture schemes (see 'Unable to disburse'). In 2019-20, the actual expenditure on such schemes was 29 per cent lower than the allocated amount. In 2020-21, the deficit was 18 per cent. The actual expenditure for 2017-18 was also 4 per cent lower than the budget.

This year (2022-23), the allocated budget for centrally sponsored schemes is ₹105,710 crore, which is among the lowest since 2019-20, when the Centre rolled out the PM-Kisan Yojana.