GUWAHATI: A Performance Audit on ‘Implementation of PM-KISAN Scheme’ revealed that the State Government implemented PM-KISAN scheme haphazardly. The report of the Comptroller and Auditor (CAG) General of India in its report said that the state government did not maintain a database of landholding farmer families to identify potential beneficiaries.
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“Emphasis was given to uploading of a large number of beneficiaries’ data within a short period of time instead of ensuring eligibility of the beneficiaries as per the provisions of the guidelines,” said the report adding that lack of monitoring by supervisory officers also adversely affected implementation of the scheme.
As a result, there were flaws in data entry causing rejection of large number (25 per cent) of data by PM-KISAN portal and PFMS during first and second level validation. Besides, 37 per cent beneficiaries were found ineligible during the enquiry conducted (May-July 2020) by the State Government. A mere 0.24 per cent of the funds released to ineligible beneficiaries was received back till October 2021.
The report highlighted that no uniform criteria was adopted in opening user IDs as in 11 selected districts, data uploaded per user IDs ranged between 774 and 83,647. Injudicious decision of the Deputy Commissioners (now district commissioners) of uploading the data within very short period of time instead of ensuring eligibility of beneficiaries under the guidelines led to uploading unverified data through unauthorised user Ids.
State Nodal Office (SNO)/District Nodal Office (DNO) did not upload the data (10,66,593) rejected by PM-KISAN portal and PFMS afresh after carrying out necessary correction in violation of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) issued by GoI. There was mismatch in entry of bank account numbers in the portal vis-à-vis account numbers as per the copies of the bank passbooks found appended with the application forms.
The CAG report recommended that the Government of Assam should take effective steps to ensure all the anomalies in the data entry are corrected and data rejected during first and second level of validation by PMKISAN portal and PFMS are verified for fresh uploading after carrying out necessary correction as per the provisions of relevant SOP of the Centre. The state should ensure that database of land holding farmer families is created and all eligible land holding farmer families receive the benefit of the scheme. The state should initiate steps to ensure that an effective monitoring mechanism is put in place and activities of the State Level Review, Monitoring and Grievance Redressal Committee (SLRM&GRC) are documented properly. The report also suggested that the state should ensure benefits released to ineligible beneficiaries are recovered and refunded to the Centre without further delay.
