If you play spot the difference with the election manifestos of BJP, one of things that’s there is 2019 but absent in 2024 is the promise to double farmers’ income.

It was a promise that the BJP government, in one form or the other, kept milking for the past 10 years to influence 55% of the population that are engaged in agriculture.

It went missing from the campaign spiel for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections because Modi couldn’t keep his signature promise.

As the promise of doubling farmers’ income lies in tatters, The Reporters’ Collective undertook a read of one of the most vexatious documents – Union budget –to find answers to why the Modi government failed.

The answer was in black and white.

The Modi government had launched a slew of schemes, and repackaged some existing ones, often prefixed with the self-aggrandising moniker “Prime Minister”, with the stated objective of doubling farmers’ income.

One of these was PM AASHA or Pradhan Mantri Annadata Aay Sanrakshan Abhiyaan, a scheme meant to protect the income of millions of farmers who grow pulses and oilseeds across the country.

Data reviewed by The Reporters’ Collective shows the scheme saw real spending only in the months close to 2019 and the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections in the country. In the three years between the two general elections, the government did not spend a single rupee on the scheme despite prices of oilseeds being consistently below the minimum standard price.

So, the PM AASHA scheme served solely as an electoral tool to patronise farmers rather than to provide consistent, viable and stable support to them while market prices of crops covered by it crashed.

But how could the government keep tom-tomming a scheme as a success for years despite sporadic funding?

The trick was similar to how mash-ups cleverly cash in on popular song tracks.

Modi government picked a decades-old UPA-era scheme under which central agencies had been buying oilseeds and pulses worth thousands of crores directly from farmers and added two new components: one, compensate oilseed farmers with cash if they end up selling their produce in the market for less than the minimum support price; two, run pilots to get private players to buy from farmers at MSP. The new upcycled scheme was sold as a new strategy for doubling farmers’ income under brand PM AASHA.

So, while the legacy procurement scheme continued to do the heavy-lifting, helping keep the spending figures healthy, the PM AASHA scheme brought in by Modi hid its pale figures behind the aggregate spending.

Click here to read the full story by Shreegireesh Jalihal and Navya Asopa on how a Modi government’s scheme to double farmers’ income goes on overdrive during election but stalls otherwise.