Hello,

Why would any government copy a scam-riddled model that’s proven to be a failure? The Modi government did. And guess what? It flopped – again.

What we are talking about is the price protection scheme for farmers, officially known as price deficiency payment system (PDPS). It was the showpiece of the three-pronged PM Aasha scheme launched in 2019 to protect farmers against wildly fluctuating prices of pulses and oilseeds. PDPS promised to top up the earnings if farmers earned less than the government-fixed minimum support price (MSP).

The Union government had adopted from Madhya Pradesh the price protection scheme despite the state government scrapping it within six months of launch. It was hobbled by a design flaw that allowed traders to rig prices.

But didn’t anyone tell the Modi government not to make the blind leap nationally with the failed model? As a fact, we now know from internal documents that quite a few had warned: Niti Aayog did. The majority of the states it consulted did, including the UP government which explicitly said the model would lead to cartelisation. Researchers commissioned to study the state model’s fiasco did. Independent experts did.

They all, in more of less the same words, said the state’s model has to be rewired before scaling it nationally.

But the Modi government pushed ahead. We don’t know for sure why a government would adopt a failure and sell it nationally as a boon for farmers. Maybe it was in a rush to reap election dividends? The scheme was pushed ahead of the 2019 election and was prominently plastered across BJP’s manifesto.

As The Collective previously reported, the scheme actually served as a dummy while the tough job of supporting farmers was done by a decades-old UPA-era direct procurement scheme. A budget trick clubbed the two together to make the PDPS scheme larger than it actually is.

PM Aasha is emblematic of the Modi government’s underprepared and underfunded policy decisions that talk a good game of assisting farmers but merely serve the purpose of making an impression before crucial elections.

Worse, internally the government admitted what it would not publicly: It’s anxious about putting more money into the hands of farmers – for fear of inflation.

My colleague Shreegireeh Jalihal in his latest investigation tells you the story of how the Modi government scaled up nationally a price protection scheme for farmers disregarding internal warnings that it is prone to corruption and evidence from the disastrous experiment in a state.

Read the whole story here.