Telangana: State Agriculture Department is to rope in the NACH launched by the NPCI

Hyderabad: The State Agriculture Department (SAD) is to rope in the National Automated Clearing House (NACH), launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for the disbursal of funds into the farm loan waiver into the farmers' accounts. It may be mentioned here that the NACH which has a secure and scalable platform with features like both transaction and file-based transaction processing capabilities.

According to the SAD sources, so far the direct payment disbursal to the farmers against various schemes are deposited based on the data developed through different surveys, including the field inspections by the Assistant Agriculture Extension Officers at the field level.

Speaking to The Hans India, a SAD official said the department has not only the passbook numbers of the each and every farmer but also the extent of land, the kind of crops being cultivated by them during the given agriculture season.

The financial transactions like Rythu Bandhu Scheme (RBS) have been deposited based on this data. However, the Centre which has taken different data sources from the State and it had run the data mining tools, according to its parameters, to ensure there is no duplicity in the beneficiaries.

For example, a farmer might have two acres in one district and one more acre in a different district. That apart, the farmer might have availed bank loans on the lands located in different districts. In turn, this might cause leakages in the implementation of the direct benefit funds transfer schemes, he added.

As of now, the bank branches at the mandal level along with the agriculture and revenue officials are vetting the beneficiaries list. Then, the same is validated at the district and state levels to ensure there are no repetitions in the list of beneficiaries.

Taking care of such issues as part of the disbursal of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM- KISAN), the Centre has made an enormous exercise using the data mining tools with different databases collected and developed for Telangana by the SAD, National Informatics Centre, National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC), the Comprehensive Household Survey (CHS) etc.

That is how "the Centre has rolled out the lists of beneficiaries linking the lands of farmers located in different places with other details to their Aadhaar cards. And, the process of depositing the funds into the farmers accounts have been hassle-free with the deployment of NACH system," he official said.

The multi-level data validation, file-based transaction processing of NACH is accessible to all the participants like the department, banks and the farmers. Following this, the SAD has roped in the NACH and the pilot based transactions being conducted are met with success. Once the final beneficiary lists are finalised then the NACH is to run the first trench of farm loan waiver disbursal, the sources said.