KALIA Scheme: Assessing Odisha’s Farmer Welfare Programme and Its Transition to CM Kisan Yojana 

Policy Update
Lubina Dua

Background

Odisha’s agricultural economy has long been marked by deep structural vulnerabilities. The state is home to one of India’s largest concentrations of small and marginal farmers, sharecroppers, and landless agricultural labourers — communities that have historically been excluded from formal credit systems, trapped in cycles of debt with informal moneylenders, and poorly served by blanket agricultural loan waiver programmes that tend to benefit larger, bank-linked farmers rather than the most economically precarious households.

Against this backdrop, the Government of Odisha launched the Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation (KALIA) scheme in December 2018. Unlike conventional agricultural welfare schemes, KALIA was deliberately designed to move away from loan waivers,which temporarily relieve credit obligations but shrink future lending- toward direct, recurring income support disbursed through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). The scheme targeted not only small and marginal farmers but also landless agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, and vulnerable cultivators who had been systematically excluded from earlier welfare frameworks.

Implemented by the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, KALIA was announced ahead of the 2019 state assembly elections but was positioned as a long-term structural intervention rather than an electoral measure. Its total budgetary outlay was set at over Rs. 10,000 crore, with an ambition to cover 92% of Odisha’s cultivating households.

In 2024, following a change in government, KALIA was restructured and rebranded as the CM Kisan Yojana under the new BJP-led administration of Chief Minister Mohan Majhi. This transition — retaining KALIA’s core architecture while modifying benefit structures and streamlining it with PM Kisan — makes the scheme an important case study in how state-level welfare programmes evolve across political cycles.

Functioning

KALIA operated across six distinct components, though as the CAG report later documented, only two were fully implemented during its active phase.

Table 1: KALIA Scheme Components and Financial Assistance

Source: Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, Government of Odisha (2019); CAG Compliance Audit Report No. 2 of 2024

The scheme’s delivery infrastructure was built on three pillars that distinguished it from earlier welfare programmes. First, a multi-tier beneficiary verification process using Green Forms (self-nomination by eligible farmers) and Red Forms (self-exclusion by ineligible households) was deployed at the Gram Panchayat, Block, and District levels. Second, KALIA integrated data from over 20 government databases, including Aadhaar, land records, bank account verification systems, pension records, and tax databases, to cross-verify eligibility and exclude government employees, income tax payers, and large landowners. Third, all disbursements were made exclusively through DBT directly into beneficiaries’ bank accounts, eliminating intermediaries.

This data architecture was developed in collaboration with Samagra Governance, a public systems consulting organisation, and was considered a significant innovation in state-level welfare delivery at the time of its launch.

Under CM Kisan Yojana (2024 onwards), the benefit structure was revised. Small and marginal farmers now receive Rs. 4,000 per year in two instalments of Rs. 2,000 each (down from Rs. 10,000 per year under KALIA). Landless households continue to receive Rs. 12,500 per year. The scheme operates alongside PM Kisan, with eligible farmers potentially receiving benefits from both programmes. A dedicated CM Kisan portal integrates beneficiary registration for both schemes.

Performance

KALIA achieved considerable administrative scale during its operational years. Between 2019 and 2021, 65.64 lakh beneficiaries received at least one instalment under the scheme. The state disbursed ₹742.58 crore to 37.12 lakh beneficiaries during the Rabi season of 2021, while a further ₹804 crore was transferred to approximately 40 lakh small and marginal farmers in May 2022. The scheme also received a budgetary allocation of ₹3,195 crore in 2021, reflecting the scale of the state’s commitment to direct agricultural income support. 

Table 2: KALIA Scheme Disbursement Timeline (Key Milestones)

Source: Government of Odisha Chief Minister’s Office press releases (2019-22); Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment

The 2021 budget allocation for KALIA stood at Rs. 3,195 crore, reflecting the programme’s scale of ambition. However, the CAG Compliance Audit Report for the year ended March 2022, published in 2024, revealed significant implementation failures that complicated the headline numbers.

CAG Findings: The report found that out of six planned components, only two (cultivation support and livelihood support for landless households) were implemented during 2018-21. Of 65.64 lakh beneficiaries covered, the department identified 9.76 lakh as ineligible during implementation, and the CAG independently identified a further 2.96 lakh ineligible beneficiaries, bringing the total to 12.72 lakh ineligible beneficiaries who had received funds. Against these 12.72 lakh ineligible recipients, Rs. 782.26 crore had been transferred, with the CAG noting “remote chances of recovery.” An additional Rs. 107.64 crore was released to 1.28 lakh account holders whose names did not match the registered beneficiaries, indicating payments to potentially unauthorised persons.

Table 3: CAG Audit Findings on KALIA Scheme (2022)

Source: CAG Compliance Audit Report No. 2 of 2024, Government of Odisha

Under CM Kisan Yojana (2024-25), the state budget allocated Rs. 1,935 crore. The first instalment of Rs. 2,000 was disbursed in September 2024 at Sambalpur on the occasion of Nuakhai, and the second instalment was released on 30 April 2025 on Akshaya Tritiya.

Impact

KALIA’s most significant contribution was to expand the conception of agricultural welfare beyond the farmer-with-land-and-loan-account model. By explicitly including landless labourers, sharecroppers, and vulnerable cultivators, KALIA reached communities that had been structurally excluded from prior loan-waiver frameworks. This was a genuine policy innovation at the state level, and several economists noted that direct income support is preferable to debt waivers as it does not distort credit markets or reduce future lending capacity.

The DBT model significantly reduced leakage compared to earlier cash-transfer mechanisms, and the integration of Aadhaar and land records into a unified beneficiary database, crossing over 20 government data sources, was a meaningful advance in state-level data governance. Samagra Governance documented the digitisation of over 96 lakh Green Forms across Gram Panchayats, which represented one of the largest grassroots data collection exercises in Odisha’s administrative history.

For women farmers and landless women labourers, KALIA provided an important channel of direct financial access. Women beneficiaries received priority treatment under the scheme, and the DBT model deposited funds directly into individual bank accounts, reducing the risk of intra-household diversion of funds that often characterises male-intermediated transfers.

The scheme’s political economy impact was also notable. KALIA’s launch contributed to the Biju Janata Dal’s electoral success in the 2019 state assembly elections. However, the incoming BJP government in 2024 chose to retain the scheme’s architecture rather than dismantle it, restructuring it as CM Kisan Yojana, which reflects a broader consensus on the validity of direct income support as a farm welfare instrument.

Emerging Issues

1. Large-scale inclusion and exclusion errors: The CAG’s finding of 12.72 lakh ineligible beneficiaries receiving Rs. 782.26 crore, with “remote chances of recovery”, represents a significant governance failure. Simultaneously, the CAG noted that genuinely eligible farmers were excluded because the department used an outdated seed DBT list as the initial beneficiary database rather than conducting a comprehensive fresh survey. Both inclusion errors (ineligible households receiving funds) and exclusion errors (eligible households not receiving funds) were present at scale. 

Suggestion: Establish a permanent, annually updated State Farmer Registry linked to Aadhaar, land records, and SECC data, with mandatory re-verification of eligibility every two years. The CM Kisan portal is a step in this direction but needs to be made the authoritative single source rather than one of multiple parallel lists.

2. Incomplete implementation of promised components: Only 2 of KALIA’s 6 components were implemented during 2018-21. The vulnerable agricultural household support, interest-free crop loan, accident insurance activation, and KALIA scholarship components either saw minimal implementation or were delayed beyond the scheme’s active phase. This represented a significant gap between policy design and delivery, and also meant that the scheme’s most vulnerable target group, the elderly, disabled, and sick, received the least support. 

Suggestion: In the transition to CM Kisan Yojana, the Odisha government should explicitly address which KALIA components are being carried forward, modified, or discontinued, with a public-facing component-wise implementation report published annually.

3. Inconsistency in instalment delivery: Of the 65.64 lakh beneficiaries covered between 2019 and 2021, only 41.64 lakh received all three planned instalments. A further 8.09 lakh received two instalments, and 15.91 lakh received only one. This inconsistency, affecting nearly 37% of covered beneficiaries, undermines the income predictability that is central to the scheme’s stated objective. Farmers who received only one instalment of Rs. 2,000 received a fraction of the promised Rs. 10,000 per season. 

Suggestion: Introduce a grievance redressal mechanism that allows beneficiaries to flag missed instalments, with mandatory resolution timelines. Real-time instalment tracking should be made accessible to beneficiaries through the CM Kisan portal and via SMS.

4. Reduced benefit quantum under CM Kisan Yojana: The transition from KALIA to CM Kisan Yojana has reduced the per-farmer annual cash support for small and marginal farmers from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 4,000, a 60% reduction in nominal terms. While the CM Kisan Yojana supplements PM Kisan (which provides Rs. 6,000 per year), the combined benefit of Rs. 10,000 is lower in real terms given inflation since 2018. For landless households, the Rs. 12,500 support has been retained, which is a positive continuity. 

Suggestion: Index the per-farmer cash support to agricultural input inflation, with a review mechanism every three years to assess adequacy relative to farming costs.

5. Political economy and scheme continuity:  KALIA’s abrupt transition to CM Kisan Yojana following the 2024 election result created a period of administrative uncertainty for beneficiaries. Farmers who had registered under KALIA needed to re-verify their eligibility under the new portal, and there were reported delays in the first instalment. The renaming of welfare schemes across political cycles — without corresponding improvements in coverage or benefit quantum- raises questions about administrative efficiency and continuity of delivery. 

Suggestion: Establish statutory protection for direct income support schemes, requiring legislative approval for discontinuation or significant modification, to insulate beneficiary communities from political transitions.

Way Forward

KALIA demonstrated the value of extending agricultural income support beyond landowning farmers with formal credit relationships. Its inclusion of landless households, sharecroppers and vulnerable cultivators, together with its use of direct transfers and integrated administrative databases, offers important lessons for the design of state-level farm-welfare programmes.

Its experience also shows that ambitious policy design must be supported by accurate beneficiary records, component-wise implementation capacity and predictable delivery. Under CM Kisan Yojana, the immediate priority should therefore be to establish a continuously updated farmer registry, ensure that instalments follow the agricultural calendar and provide beneficiaries with an effective mechanism for correcting records and resolving payment failures.

The government must also move beyond reporting expenditure and beneficiary counts. Independent evaluations should determine whether assistance improves household income, agricultural investment, livelihood diversification, indebtedness, productivity and women’s control over financial resources. Publishing these findings in disaggregated form would allow the programme to be assessed according to outcomes rather than the scale of disbursement alone.

Finally, the transition from KALIA should be used to clarify the future of each promised welfare component. CM Kisan Yojana should publish annual information on component-wise expenditure, coverage, rejected applications, failed payments, grievances and corrective action. Such transparency would help convert the programme from a periodic cash-transfer mechanism into a more accountable and evidence-driven system of agricultural social protection.

The success of CM Kisan Yojana will ultimately depend on whether it can preserve KALIA’s inclusive vision while correcting its targeting, implementation and evaluation weaknesses. The objective should not simply be to transfer funds to a large number of accounts, but to deliver timely, adequate and verifiable support that produces measurable improvements in the economic security of Odisha’s farming and landless agricultural households.

References 

Comptroller and Auditor General of India. (2024). Compliance Audit Report No. 2 of 2024: Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation (KALIA) Scheme, Government of Odisha (Year ended March 2022). CAG India.https://cag.gov.in/uploads/download_audit_report/2024/AR-(CA)_Odisha_2020-22_English_20.04.2024_Final-print-066e1a4ae0aa120.32196875.pdf

Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, Government of Odisha. (2019). KALIA Scheme: Operational guidelines. Government of Odisha. https://agri.odisha.gov.in/sites/default/files/2021-05/Notification-KALIA-scheme.pdf

Samagra Governance. (2025). Transforming farmer welfare in Odisha: The KALIA story. https://samagragovernance.in/blog/2025-05-12-transforming-farmer-welfare-in-odisha-the-kalia-story/

Business Standard. (2024, September 12). Rs 782.2 cr given to 1.27L ineligible beneficiaries under KALIA scheme: CAG. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/rs-782-2-cr-given-to-12-2l-ineligible-beneficiaries-under-kalia-scheme-cag-124091200419_1.html

Deccan Chronicle. (2024, September 11). CAG report highlights failures in Odisha’s KALIA scheme. https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/cag-report-highlights-failures-in-odishas-kalia-scheme-1822916

ClearTax. (2025). CM Kisan Yojana Odisha: Eligibility, registration, apply online, beneficiary list. https://cleartax.in/s/cm-kisan-yojana-odisha

Government of Odisha. (n.d.). CM Kisan portal. Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment. https://cmkportal.odisha.gov.in/BeneficiaryList

Government of Odisha. (n.d.). KALIA scheme official portal. https://kalia.odisha.gov.in

About the Contributor:

Lubina Dua is a policy researcher whose work focuses on governance, institutional design, and evidence-based public policy. She has represented India at the Harvard Conference on Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) and participated in the World Bank Youth Summit. 

Acknowledgement:

The author extends sincere thanks to the IMPRI team for their guidance.

Reviewed by: Kavin Adithya CB, Shivani Chauhan

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.

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