PM-KISAN excludes tenant farmers and landless labourers — critically evaluate its equity dimension.

Launched as a Central Sector Scheme in 2019, PM-KISAN transfers ₹6,000/year in three instalments to land-holding farmer families via Aadhaar-seeded DBT [1]. Anchoring entitlement to recorded land ownership makes it administratively clean but raises a sharp equity question, since India's cultivation is done substantially by those who own no title.

Progressive equity features

• Exclusion of the affluent: income-tax payers, government employees above Group D, constitutional post-holders and high pensioners are barred, targeting support downward [1].
• Gender inclusion: the 23rd instalment (June 2026) reached 2.18 crore women farmers among 9.44 crore beneficiaries — individual entitlement to landed women [4].
• Leakage plugging: mandatory e-KYC, land-seeding and Aadhaar linkage weeded out ineligible beneficiaries, improving vertical equity of public spending [3].

Equity deficits

• Tenant farmers excluded: sharecroppers and oral-lease cultivators bear input costs and price risk yet get nothing; Government confirms no proposal to include them [2].
• Landless labourers ignored: the poorest agrarian class, wholly dependent on wages, falls outside a land-linked design.
• Land-record bias: reliance on titles disadvantages women without patta, tribal shifting cultivators and states with poor records — a horizontal-equity gap.

Thus PM-KISAN is progressive in targeting but regressive in coverage, privileging ownership over actual cultivation. A phased move toward tenancy registration (Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act), a cultivator-based identifier, and convergence with wage schemes like MGNREGA would align it with the SDG-2 goal of leaving no farmer behind.