Why income support schemes tend to elude tenant farmers: Grassroots studies

Amid the rising buzz that instalments under Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) could go up ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha elections, an old question rears its head again: How and in what form can benefits be passed on to tenant farmers, or growers who do not own land?

PM-Kisan is a central government scheme of 2018 that gives Rs 6,000 a year as minimum income support to small and marginal farmers. It covers farmer families with cultivable landholding in their names.

Tenant, or landless, farmers have usually been off the radar for several government schemes. In some states they have been included in the direct benefit transfer (DBT) programme, but a cohesive approach has been missing.

The question pertains to a large, and growing, section.

According to the “Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households” survey for 2018-19 by the National Statistical Office (NSO), 17.3 per cent of the estimated 101.98 million operational holdings (that is, farms) in rural India were on leased lands. The share of such leased-in lands in the total area used for agricultural production was 13 per cent. In previous surveys, the NSO had pegged the share of leased-in holdings at 11.3 per cent and 6.5 per cent, respectively.

Several experts say the true share could be more. According to them, the NSO underestimates it because most of these leases are oral and do not have recorded details.

“While our studies and ground-level observations show that the NSO percentages are serious underestimates in many states, the increasing trend of tenant holdings over time is evident even in the NSO data,” Kiran Vissa, co-founder of Rythu Swarajya Vedike, a grassroots-based farmers’ organisation, told Business Standard.

For instance, the NSO survey of 2018-19 says around 17.5 per cent of the total operational holding in Telangana is under tenancy. But Rythu Swarajya Vedike puts it as high as 35 per cent.

Former Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices chairman, the late Tajamul Haque, in a study done a few years back had shown that almost 57 per cent of the leased land in kharif season and 54 per cent in rabi was on short-term leases.

Tenant farmers and DBT

Ground reports show that only Odisha’s KALIA, or Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation, and Andhra Pradesh’s Rythu Bharosa provide some sort of assistance to tenant farmers. Telangana’s Rythu Bandhu and the Centre’s PM-KISAN do not include tenant or landless farmers.

Odisha’s KALIA promises Rs 12,500 per year in a single tranche to every “small and marginal farmer”. The same amount is also given to each landless household for setting up small business units.

Under Andhra’s YSR Rythu Bharosa-PM Kisan scheme, farmers get a financial assistance of Rs 13,500 per annum where the state government contributes Rs 7,500 and the rest comes from the Government of India. The benefit is extended to landless tenant farmers and also those who cultivate on patta lands.

“In Andhra Pradesh, the state government has an explicit policy of inclusion of tenant farmers, unlike in the neighbouring Telangana where the income support is given on the basis of landholding. In Andhra Pradesh, the support is per family, which in itself irons out a lot of glitches,” Vissa said.

Andhra also has CCRC (Crop Cultivator Rights Cards) as part of an Act. CCRC holders get the Rythu Bharosa benefits. However, a survey by Vissa’s organisation found that only 8.8 per cent of the surveyed tenants had CCRCs. It also found that obtaining the owner’s signature was among the biggest hurdles in getting a CCRC.

The study was conducted during the months of January-February and August 2022, covering the 12 districts of Visakhapatnam, East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Prakasam, YSR Kadapa, Anantapur, Kurnool, Nellore, Srikakulam, and Vizianagaram. It was based on a door-to-door survey of 4,154 tenant farmers in 34 gram panchayats across the state.

The survey also found that 82 per cent of the tenant farmers in Andhra had no access to bank loans, had incurred huge debt from private moneylenders, and that about three quarters of farmer suicides in the state were by tenant farmers.

In neighbouring Telangana, a simultaneous survey found that only 0.4 per cent of the tenant farmers received a share of the Rythu Bandhu income support from the landlords and a mere 1 per cent received compensation for crop damage, though 77 per cent of them had suffered some sort of damage in the three years preceding the survey.

The Telangana report was prepared after a door-to-door survey of 7,744 farmers in 34 villages across 20 districts. Of them, 2,753 were tenant farmers cultivating on leased land.

The average debt due to cultivation for a tenant farmer of the state was around Rs 2.7 lakh, of which nearly 75 per cent was from private moneylenders at high interest rates of 24 to 60 per cent. The study also found that only 5 per cent of the tenant farmers had received Loan Eligibility Card under the state’s Licensed Cultivators’ Act 2011 and only about 44 per cent could sell their crop at the minimum support price as procurement was tied — as in most other places — to land ownership.

The Telangana survey also found that an overwhelming number of tenant farmers in the state, almost 61 per cent, belonged to the backward castes, while scheduled castes were in second place at 22.9 per cent. Scheduled tribes were third, at 9.7 per cent.

Legalising tenancy?

“Since PM-KISAN does not include tenant farmers, for state schemes the local governments rely on their own methods to identify tenant farmers,” Vissa said. Odisha’s KALIA has a simple registration process for tenant farmers, who get verified before benefit transfer.

One way out is to legalise tenancy. But that is easier said than done.

Land falls within the domain of state governments, some of which can be reluctant to legalise tenancy. Most landlords desist from legal tenancy for the fear of losing control over their land.

A working paper by NITI Aayog member and agriculture economist Ramesh Chand, titled “From Green Revolution to Amrit Kaal”, recognises this problem. “States must liberalise the lease of agricultural land to encourage landowners to rent out their land formally without any fear of losing title or control of land,” says the paper.

S Mahendra Dev, former director and vice chancellor of Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, says that because landless farmers are not included in any benefit scheme their wages are not rising much.

“One way to address this problem is uniform income transfer, as governments are doing with women-centric programmes. Anyway, rich people don’t opt for such uniform schemes. Exclusion criteria can be put in place to weed out ineligible beneficiaries,” Dev says.