The Tamil Nadu Cauvery Farmers’ Protection Association has appealed to the Centre to extend the assistance provided under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme to tenant farmers too.
In a representation, association secretary Sundara Vimal Nathan said under the scheme, financial assistance of ₹6,000 a year is provided to eligible farmers in three instalments to enable them take care of expenses related to agriculture, allied activities, and domestic needs.
Although the scheme had been widely appreciated as an initiative to support farmers, at present the benefit was given to landholding farmers only. “There are approximately two crore tenant farmers and share croppers in India. A significant number of them belong to economically and socially disadvantaged communities, including Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, and agricultural labourer families. In Tamil Nadu, approximately 4 lakh acres of agricultural land are under tenant cultivation. Many tenant farmers have been cultivating lands for generations. However, because they do not own the lands they cultivate, they have not been able to receive the benefits of PM-KISAN. The exclusion of such genuine cultivators needs to be reconsidered in the interest of fairness and equality,” said Mr. Vimal Nathan said.
He said tenant farmers incur substantial additional expenditure in the form of annual lease rent apart from the cost of cultivation. “Many farmers cultivate lands belonging to temples, mutts, adheenams, churches, mosques, charitable trusts, and other private landowners. In several cases, farmers are required to pay annual lease amounts of approximately ₹10,000 to ₹12,000 in addition to meeting the entire cost of cultivation,” he said and urged the Prime Minister to amend the PM-KISAN guidelines suitably amended so that genuine tenant farmers and share-croppers too were made eligible to receive financial assistance under the scheme, subject to an appropriate verification mechanism.
Mr. Vimal Nathan called for an increase in the assistance – from ₹6,000 to ₹15,000 a year – as the cost of cultivation and prices of inputs had increased since the scheme was launched. He called for extending the benefit to every eligible farmer genuinely engaged in agricultural cultivation, without restricting to one member in a family, processing all pending applications from farmers to get the assistance.
Published – September 24, 2026 05:44 pm IST
