Discuss the role of DBT in delivering targeted relief to farmers, with its limitations.

Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) routes an entitlement straight into the beneficiary's bank account, bypassing intermediaries. The one-time, interest-free working capital assistance of ₹50,000 per barn to about 44,000 FCV tobacco growers in Andhra Pradesh, paid via DBT [1], illustrates both its reach and its structural limits.

Role in delivering targeted relief

• Speed and leakage control: an outlay of about ₹220 crore moves directly to growers, removing intermediaries and disbursement delays during a distressed marketing season [1].
• Precision through registries: the transfer is keyed to the licensed barn, using the Tobacco Board's grower registrations and barn licences — recently given three-year validity for easier compliance [3][4].
• Crowding out distress borrowing: stated aims include meeting household needs, repaying institutional loans and buying inputs, reducing dependence on private moneylenders [1].
• Fiscal economy: such interest-free advances have earlier been recovered from the grower's own auction sale proceeds [2], so the public cost is largely the interest forgone.

Limitations

• Only as inclusive as the database: in 2015-16 there were 44,958 registered growers against 39,220 licensed barns [3]; tenants and sharecroppers curing in another's barn fall outside a per-barn transfer.
• The unregistered are invisible: the Board has repeatedly had to create special permission for produce of unregistered growers [5]; those outside the register receive nothing.
• Excludes farm labour: curing is labour-intensive, yet wage workers — whose work-days are cut first — are not account-holders in the scheme [1].
• Cash cannot correct price distress: ₹220 crore [1] is a small fraction of the ₹6,313.58 crore growers earned in one strong recent season [6]; it bridges liquidity, not income.
• No structural shift: repeated transfers to the same crop sit uneasily with WHO FCTC Article 17, which asks Parties to promote economically viable alternatives for tobacco growers [7].

DBT is therefore a delivery mechanism, not a policy in itself: it makes relief fast, traceable and targeted, but its fairness depends on the quality of the underlying register. Updating registries to capture tenants and labour, and pairing liquidity support with a voluntary crop-diversification track, would convert efficient delivery into durable farmer welfare.