All About – Rythu Bandhu scheme

Rythu Bandhu scheme also Farmers’ Investment Support Scheme (FISS) is a welfare program to support farmers investment for two crop a year by the Government of Telangana. The government will provide ₹4000 per acre per season to support the farm investment. It will be provided twice a year, for rabi and kharif seasons. This is the first such scheme in India. It will be launched on 10th May 2018.

The scheme was announced by the Chief Minister of Telangana, K. Chandrashekhar Rao at Farmers Coordiantion Committee/Rythu Samanvaya Samiti conference at Rajendranagar in Jayashankar Agriculture University on 25 February 2018.

An allocation of ₹12,000 crores was made in 2018-19 state budget.

The Chief Minister was the first farmer to forgo the support or Give it up!, provided by the government and appealed to all rich farmers to do the same. The farmers money who forgo the support will go to Rythu Samanvaya Samithi corpus. It was earlier known as Rythu Lakshmi.

The scheme offers a financial help of ₹8,000 per year to each farmer (two crops). There is no cap on the number of acres as over 97% of farmers have less than 10 acres per person. It will launch on 10th May 2018 before kharif season and for Rabi in November. The total farming land is 1.42 crore acres and the number of farmers in the state is 71.75 lakh. Tenant farmers were excluded from the scheme.

The money will be given to the farmers through a bank bearer cheque by a newly set up corporation, Rythu Samanvaya Samiti. The Agriculture Extension Officers (AEOs) will supervise the Rythu Bandhu cheques distributed at village level. They will be required to make entries of cheque details on tablet computer provided to them.

Along with the cheque, the government is also giving the new Pattadar Passport, the title deed after an exercise to purify the land records was done by the government. The new passbook is highly secure with 17 tamper-proof security features, and a land bank website, Dharani, to have all land holdings in the state.