Rythu Bandhu scheme


Rythu Bandhu scheme also Farmers’ Investment Support Scheme is a welfare program to support farmer’s investment for two crops a year by the Government of Telangana. The government is providing 58.33 lakh farmers, ₹5000 per acre per season to support the farm investment, twice a year, for rabi and kharif seasons. This is a first direct farmer investment support scheme in India, where the cash is paid directly.

History

The scheme was announced by the Chief Minister of Telangana, K. Chandrashekhar Rao at Farmers Coordination Committee conference at Jayashankar Agriculture University on 25 February 2018. An allocation of ₹12,000 crores was made in 2018-19 state budget. It was launched on 10 May 2018 at Dharmarajpalli village in Karimnagar. If a farmer has a lot of field such that they are due more than Rs. 49,000 then they get a second check for the remaining amount.

The scheme

The scheme offers a financial help of ₹10,000 per year to each farmer. There is no cap on the number of acres, and most of the farmers are small and marginal. The total farming land is 1.43 crore acres and the number of farmers in the state stood at 58.33 lakh. Around 55% of population in Telangana make a living from agriculture.
The agriculture land holdings are:
Land ExtentNo. of farmersTotal AcresEst.Cost-
under 1 acre18 lakhs18 lakhs14.4 billionAs of 16 February 2020, Rythu Bandhu has been stopped for farmers who have more than 5 acres.30.8%
under 1-2 acres24 lakhs48 lakhs38.4 billion41.9%
under 3-5 acres11 lakhs44 lakhs 35.2 billion18.8%
5-10 acres4.4 lakhs33 lakhs 26.4 billion7.5%
> 10 acres94,0009.4 lakhs7.52 billion1.6%
> 25 acres64881.62 lakhs1.3 billion0.1%
> 50 acres29814900119 million0.005%


Land ceiling & Tenancy

As per AP Land Ceiling Act 1976, any person cannot hold more than 51 acres agriculture land and 21 acres dryland. Tenant farmers were excluded from the scheme to prevent legal disputes arising out of tenancy. To prevent legal disputes, the tenancy column was removed from the newly issued Pattadar Passbook.

Give it Up! Option

The Chief Minister was the first farmer to forgo the support called as, Give it up!, given by the government and appealed to all rich farmers to do the same. The farmers who forgo the support, the money goes to the corpus of Rythu Samanvaya Samithi corpus.

Distribution

The money is given to the farmers through a bank bearer cheque. The Agriculture Extension Officers will supervise the Rythu Bandhu cheques distribution at village level. They make entries cheque details on a tablet computer provided to them for easy monitoring.

New Pattadar Passbook

Along with the cheque, the government is also giving the new Pattadar Passbook, the title deed after an exercise to purify the land records was done by the government. The new passbook is highly secure with 17 tamper-proof security features, and a land bank website, Dharani, to have all land holdings in the state.

Monitoring

A special dashboard software is being developed by the NIC to monitor the scheme remotely. The sample for the research is selected through random sampling.

Annadatha Sukhibhava

Annadatha Sukhibhava is a welfare program started by Andhra Pradesh Government to provide ₹15,000 investment support to small and marginal farmer’s family per annum which includes ₹6000 Central Government Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi share. The government is providing support to nearly 70 lakh farmers including tenant farmers. This farmer investment support scheme where the cash is paid directly into the Aadhaar linked bank accounts will cover all the farmers in the state on Family as unit basis without any conditions. It was formally started on 19-02-2019 by providing ₹1000 Initially by RTGS Center.

MIT study

, a poverty alleviation institute. It is conducting the study for randomly selected sample and is using High-frequency monitoring in-Person Phone Survey and IVR based survey on the effectiveness of the scheme. A 40-member team of professors is carrying out the calls.