Assam saw the highest amount being siphoned off under Modi government’s PM-Kisan scheme. Our investigation from the state reveals how the scam worked.
Sadiq Naqvi & Snigdha Poonam
May 11, 2022 · 06:30 am
Design | Rubin D'Souza
On October 29, Himadri Seshadri, assisting officer at Assam’s Agriculture Directorate, reached her office and opened up the website of PM-Kisan, the central government’s flagship welfare scheme for farmers. Launched in 2019, PM-Kisan aims to pay Rs 6,000 in three instalments every year to millions of eligible farmers across India.
Seshadri typed in the organisation’s official username and password to access the dashboard for the state of Assam. She found herself locked out.
“Someone had changed the password. They must have done it at night because the last time I logged in was before leaving the office,” Seshadri told us when we met her at her Guwahati office the next day.
Only those with official usernames and passwords can log in to the portal. By entering these in, they generate one-time passwords that are sent to mobile numbers linked to those usernames, and are valid for 24 hours. (This January, the OTP window was changed to a few minutes.) The usernames, also referred to as IDs, are assigned to agriculture departments across districts, and allows them to add beneficiaries to the scheme, and monitor their numbers.
Seshadri dialed the tech support at the National Informatics Centre, or NIC, in Delhi, which provides technology-related support to central and state governments. She was told that they had received similar complaints from other states as well. She reset the password using an OTP that came to the mobile phone of the state nodal officer.
When she logged in using the new password, Seshadri realised something strange. A report she had pulled out of the portal for Assam the previous evening had showed only 34 official usernames as active: one in each of Assam’s 33 districts and one at the directorate. Now, the number of active usernames for Assam was 36.
When she called the NIC again, a technician told her that the two new usernames were created at the state-level for Assam, which could only have been done at the NIC’s head office in Delhi.
But the mobile numbers corresponding to the new state-level usernames belonged to Rajasthan. The engineer said it was a case of hacking.
Meanwhile, IP addresses linked to the usernames led officials to a traffic roundabout in Lucknow. “It is a case of an organised cyber heist,” Debjit Neog, Assam’s Nodal Officer for PM-Kisan, told us.
The agriculture director made a complaint to Assam Police’s Criminal Investigation Department, or CID. The directorate also asked the NIC to block the two usernames and to find out if any new beneficiaries had been added to the portal. None were, they learnt later on.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. By this time, a barrage of irregularities had already come to light in PM-Kisan, involving scores of unauthorised usernames and thousands of unintended beneficiaries. In May 2020, the state government had ordered a probe into the matter, which was carried out by then additional chief secretary Jishnu Barua. Among the report’s many damning findings that have not been reported so far was that, of the 31 lakh individuals who had received the cash transfer, 15 lakh were not eligible for it.
The sums of money involved are staggering. Between February 2019 and July 14, 2021, 11.08 crore beneficiaries across the country received more than Rs 1.37 lakh crore, the Union agriculture minister told Parliament in July. But he admitted that 42 lakh beneficiaries who together received Rs 3,000 crore in that time had actually been ineligible.
Our interviews with dozens of government officials and others involved with the PM-Kisan scheme in Assam revealed that in the state, these beneficiaries included non-farmers, single farmers receiving funds in multiple accounts, government servants, minors, deceased persons and people who can’t be found anywhere.
So far, these anomalies have been reported as isolated, though widespread, incidents. But Scroll.in’s investigation suggests that they occurred in a systematic way.
Since July, the Centre has been urging the states to bring back the Rs 3,000 crore from the fake beneficiaries even as millions of deserving farmers remain excluded from the scheme. According to the Union agriculture minister’s statement in Parliament, Assam must recover the highest amount, of Rs 500 crore paid to 8.3 lakh ineligible beneficiaries. It is followed by Punjab (Rs 357.9 crore), Maharashtra (Rs 340.6 crore) and Tamil Nadu (Rs 258.6 crore).
Tracking the scam in Assam reveals that it began with a rush to add beneficiaries at a breakneck speed ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But once initiated, our investigation shows, the scam spiralled out of control as key government officials colluded with local middlemen to extend the cash benefit to anyone who could pay for it.
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