The Centre is preparing to launch a Unique Farmer ID for the cultivators in the country. Officials of the Union Ministry of Agriculture said that there is a plan to link the data of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana and other schemes with the land record database created by the states. Based on this database, a unique farmer identification card will be made for the farmers. Union Minister of State for Agriculture, Kailash Chaudhary gave the information to News18.
The minister said that till now we have only discussed about it and haven’t started any work because of the Coronavirus outbreak across the world.
With farmer identity card, it will be easy for the farmers to know and avail various agriculture-related schemes.
Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that the central government is in the process of creating a joint farmer database in consultation with the states. In the first phase, about 10 crore farmers registered under the PM-Kisan scheme will be covered in it.
At present there are 14.5 crore farmer families in the country, out of which 12 crore are small and marginal farmers. These small and marginal farmers are the ones with less than 2 hectares of land.
There are 6, 55,959 villages in the country. Till February, digitization or computerization of the revenue records of 5, 91,421 villages has been done. Once all the land records in the country get digitalized, the verification of those applying to take advantage of any government scheme will become easy.
Under, Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, the Central Government has collected the details of Aadhaar card, bank account number and revenue records of around 10 crore farmer families in India. In the same way if the plan of creating a unique identity card by combining this database is accomplished, then the work of farmers will become much easier.
