Evaluate the role of DBT in reducing leakages in farm welfare delivery. What gaps remain for tenant and landless cultivators?

Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) pays welfare money straight into Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, with no intermediaries in between. On 30 October 2026, PM-KISAN's 24th instalment will send over ₹18,690 crore to 9.34 crore farmers this way [1]. DBT has sharply reduced leakage in delivery. Its targeting, however, still pays some people who should not get money and leaves out others who should.

DBT's role in reducing leakages

• No middlemen: ₹6,000 a year goes in three equal instalments directly to farmer families. No dealer or official handles the cash [1][2].
• Digital checks: the scheme now links with PFMS, UIDAI and the Income Tax Department. Payments are stopped where land seeding and e-KYC are incomplete [3].
• Recovery: about ₹416 crore has been taken back from ineligible recipients such as tax payers and government employees [3].

Limits of DBT

• Weak checking at entry: in Bihar, the CAG found 48,366 income-tax payers had received ₹39.05 crore. Self-declarations were never checked, and only about 8% was recovered [4].
• Slow recovery: the job of recovering money is left to States, so progress is uneven [3].
• Genuine farmers dropped: the same seeding rules also cut off small farmers whose land or Aadhaar records are not yet linked. Official figures do not separate them from ineligible names removed.

Gaps for tenant and landless cultivators

• Ownership, not cultivation: eligibility rests on land records. The Centre has told Parliament there is no proposal to cover tenant farmers [5].
• Scale: landless agricultural labourers were about 55% of agricultural workers in 2011, and none are covered [6].
• Gender: women who farm land titled to husbands or fathers do not appear in land records.
• Falling value: the benefit is unchanged since inception, even though the 2026-27 allocation is ₹63,500 crore [2].
• A policy choice: the Kisan Credit Card already lends to tenant farmers, so tenants can be identified [7].

DBT has made farm welfare faster and more transparent, but land-record targeting has replaced leakage with exclusion. The way forward:

• States should record tenancy, using KCC tenant lists as a starting base.
• Income-tax and UIDAI checks should run before every instalment.
• The ₹6,000 benefit should be reviewed regularly.

With these steps, DBT can deliver on Article 38(2)'s mandate to reduce income inequalities and on SDGs 1 and 2.