Direct benefit transfers in Uttar Pradesh

In recent years, the government has focused on transformed mechanism of transferring subsidies directly to the beneficiaries bank account for many social protection schemes. Before implementation, various arguments were given in favour and against the DBT proposed scheme. Uttar Pradesh government has started Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) for availing benefits of any agricultural schemes in state. This paper has analysed the process for availing DBT in the state and its outreach among farmers in different zones of Uttar Pradesh. First, farmers need to register themselves on Uttar Pradesh agriculture portal to generate specific registration number and to avail benefit under government agricultural schemes. At present nearly 157 lakh farmers have registered to avail benefit of agricultural schemes which is two third of total no of farmers in state and nearly 7 lakh duplicate registration has been deleted from the portal. In registration, share of marginal farmers is nearly 52% followed by small farmers but share of marginal farmers in benefited farmers was only 25%. Since 2016–17, in addition to seed, subsidy for farm equipments and micro-nutrient is also disbursed through DBT. Since beginning of this scheme, more than 25.92 lakh farmers have received Rs. 431 crore averaging to Rs.1663 per beneficiary.