Government Schemes Touching Agriculture
Free study material · concepts, shortcuts & solved questions
This section consolidates the major central schemes that recur across soil, crop, and irrigation questions — many were already introduced in context earlier in this book (PMKSY, MIDH, National Food Security Mission); this section gathers them alongside a few more that don't attach naturally to any single earlier section, so that "which scheme does X" questions have one place to be drilled together.
| Scheme | Focus Area | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) | Irrigation | Covered in full above; four components (AIBP, Har Khet Ko Pani, Per Drop More Crop, Watershed Development) |
| Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) | Crop insurance | Launched 2016; low uniform farmer premium (2% for Kharif, 1.5% for Rabi, 5% for commercial/horticultural crops), balance subsidised by government; replaced older, less farmer-friendly insurance schemes |
| Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) | Direct income support | ₹6,000/year paid in three equal instalments directly to eligible farmer families' bank accounts, regardless of landholding size in most implementations |
| Kisan Credit Card (KCC) | Farm credit | Provides farmers timely, low-interest short-term credit for crop production needs; extended over time to cover animal husbandry and fisheries as well |
| Soil Health Card Scheme | Soil testing | Provides farmers a card reporting their soil's nutrient status (including N:P:K levels, referenced in the Fertiliser Use section above) and crop-wise fertiliser recommendations, issued on a roughly two-year cycle |
| National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) | Climate-resilient farming | One of the eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC); covers rainfed-area development, soil health, and water-use efficiency together |
| National Food Security Mission (NFSM) | Foodgrain self-sufficiency | Originally rice/wheat/pulses-focused, since expanded to cover coarse cereals and commercial crops — the direct policy descendant of the Green Revolution's original mandate, referenced in that section above |
| Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture (MIDH) | Horticulture | Umbrella scheme folding in the earlier National Horticulture Mission, referenced in the Other Notable Cash and Horticultural Crops section above |
| National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) | Edible oil self-sufficiency | Targets the edible-oil import-dependence gap noted in the Oilseeds section above, with a specific push on oil palm expansion into the Northeast and Andaman & Nicobar |
| e-NAM (National Agriculture Market) | Agricultural marketing | An electronic trading platform networking existing physical APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) mandis, intended to give farmers wider market access and more transparent price discovery beyond their local mandi |
| Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) | State-level agriculture investment | A flexible, state-plan-driven scheme letting states direct central funds toward their own priority agricultural investments rather than a rigid centrally fixed component list |
| Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY) | Fisheries/aquaculture | The formal scheme underlying the "Blue Revolution" shorthand referenced in the Green Revolution section's "family of revolutions" discussion |
| Formation of 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) | Farmer aggregation | A scheme to organise small and marginal farmers (the dominant landholding categories per the Agriculture Census above) into collectives for better input-buying and output-selling bargaining power |
Two schemes deserve a slightly longer note because they are frequently mismatched with the wrong purpose in distractor options. PMFBY insures against yield loss from natural calamities, pests, and disease — it does not guarantee a minimum price the way MSP does, a distinction worth holding firmly since both are farmer-protection schemes but protect against entirely different risks (yield risk vs price risk). Soil Health Cards are a diagnostic/advisory tool (telling a farmer what their soil needs) rather than a subsidy or credit scheme — pairing this with the N:P:K fertiliser-imbalance problem described earlier in this book shows exactly why the scheme exists: it is a direct policy response to farmers over-applying cheap urea without knowing their soil's actual phosphorus/potassium status.
Memory hook (insurance vs price vs income, three different farmer-protection schemes): "PMFBY insures the yield, MSP guarantees the price, PM-KISAN hands over cash — three different risks, three different mechanisms, easy to conflate under exam pressure."
Memory hook (the scheme-to-earlier-section map): "Every scheme here already had a home earlier in this book — PMKSY lives in Irrigation, MIDH lives in Horticulture, NFSM lives in the Green Revolution, PMMSY lives in the 'family of revolutions.'" Recognise the scheme as the same topic in a different vocabulary rather than a wholly new fact.
Practice Recall: Before reading on, distinguish what PMFBY protects against from what MSP protects against, and name the scheme that gives farmers a soil-nutrient report.
Answer: PMFBY (Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana) insures against yield loss from natural calamities/pests/disease; MSP guarantees a minimum price regardless of market rate. The Soil Health Card Scheme provides the soil-nutrient report and fertiliser recommendation.
Digital Agriculture and Precision Farming — The Newest Layer on an Old Story
A fast-emerging current-affairs layer worth attaching to this scheme list is the government's push toward "Digital Agriculture" and precision farming — using satellite remote sensing, drones, artificial intelligence-based crop-health and yield estimation, and a proposed unified farmers' database (AgriStack) to move from broad, area-wide averages (the kind almost every ranking in this book relies on) toward field-level, farmer-specific advisory and service delivery. Drone use specifically has expanded fastest in two applications: crop-health/pest-surveillance imaging (identifying disease or stress in a field earlier than a manual inspection would) and precision spraying of fertiliser/pesticide (reducing both chemical overuse — directly relevant to the N:P:K imbalance problem covered earlier — and human exposure to agrochemicals), with a dedicated subsidy push for women's Self-Help Groups to operate agricultural drones as a rural livelihood and service-provision model. This digital layer does not replace any of the older schemes and institutions covered in this book — MSP, PMFBY, Soil Health Cards, KVKs — so much as it promises, if fully realised, to make each of them more precisely targeted at the individual farm level rather than the district or block level they have historically operated at.
Memory hook: "Old scheme, new precision — AgriStack and drones don't replace MSP/PMFBY/Soil Health Cards, they aim to make each of them field-specific instead of district-average."