The Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) is a prominent traditional farming improvement program launched by the Government of India in 2015. It operates under the administrative jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The scheme is executed as an extended sub-component of Soil Health Management (SHM) under the overarching National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA). PKVY is formulated as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme aimed at promoting organic farming through a cluster-based approach and the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) of certification.
Core Objectives of the PKVY Scheme
- The primary objective of the scheme is to promote eco-friendly, chemical-free agricultural practices to ensure long-term soil health and environmental sustainability.
- The initiative seeks to reduce the financial burden on farmers by minimizing their dependence on expensive synthetic fertilizers and agrochemicals.
- The scheme aims to improve the nutritional quality of agricultural produce and tap into the growing domestic and international markets for organic food.
- It explicitly encourages the adoption of organic villages by mobilizing farmers into robust institutional clusters for better resource pooling and market access.
Key Features and Operational Mechanism
Cluster-Based Approach
- The scheme is strictly implemented using a cluster-based approach to ensure economies of scale in organic input production, certification, and marketing.
- A cluster under PKVY must comprise a minimum of 50 or more farmers holding a contiguous or overlapping land parcel of at least 20 hectares (approximately 50 acres).
- In the case of hilly tracts, specific geographic relaxations are provided to form viable clusters due to fragmented landholdings.
Participatory Guarantee System (PGS-India) Certification
- PKVY relies on the Participatory Guarantee System for India (PGS-India) for the organic certification of the agricultural produce.
- Unlike third-party certification which is capital intensive, PGS is a decentralized, peer-review-based quality assurance initiative that is free of cost for the farmers.
- The certification process emphasizes the participation of stakeholders, including producers and consumers, and operates outside the framework of independent third-party certification.
- Produce certified under the PGS system is permitted for domestic market sales, while export-oriented organic produce still requires certification under the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP).
Financial Architecture and Subsidy Allocation
The scheme provides holistic financial assistance to farmers for adopting organic farming practices over a three-year transition and consolidation period.
Beneficiary Assistance
- The scheme provides direct financial assistance of Rupees 50,000 per hectare for a comprehensive three-year period.
- Out of this total allocation, Rupees 31,000 per hectare (constituting 62 percent of the total assistance) is provided directly to the farmers through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mechanism.
- The DBT amount is strictly earmarked for the procurement of organic inputs such as bio-fertilizers, bio-pesticides, vermicompost, botanical extracts, and indigenous agricultural inputs.
- The remaining portion of the financial assistance is utilized for capacity building, cluster formation, PGS certification processes, value addition, and market linkage activities.
Funding Pattern
The scheme operates on a cost-sharing basis between the Central and State Governments.
Sub-Schemes and Strategic Convergences
Bharatiya Prakritik Krishi Paddhati (BPKP)
- Bharatiya Prakritik Krishi Paddhati (BPKP) was introduced as a dedicated sub-scheme under PKVY to specifically promote traditional indigenous practices, particularly Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF).
- BPKP explicitly prohibits the application of any synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides, focusing entirely on on-farm biomass recycling with major stress on cow dung-urine formulations.
- The sub-scheme provides financial assistance of Rupees 12,200 per hectare for a three-year period strictly for cluster formation, capacity building, and continuous handholding by trained personnel.
Namami Gange Convergence
- Under a strategic convergence with the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), PKVY is extensively implemented along the banks of the river Ganga.
- The initiative targets a 5-kilometer corridor on both sides of the river to create chemical-free agricultural zones, significantly reducing the agricultural runoff of synthetic fertilizers into the river ecosystem.