‘Who Is a Landless Agri-Labourer?’ Bengal Government Rushes to Answer Ahead of Polls

Bardhaman (Bengal): Kasim Molla is 58 years old. His back is bent from a lifetime of labour and his sinewy hands tremble when he picks up a spade. But even today, he hobbles his way to the fields outside his village, Tatkhanda in Bardhaman.

“I am a farm hand, not a land owner,” he said as he sharpened his scythe on a whetstone. “I don’t have steady work for over a third of the year. Can you imagine four months of uncertainty – of not knowing whether I’ll be able to put food on the plate the next day – for decades?”

Kasim said that neither he nor anyone in his family have ever owned even a needle eye’s worth of land in five generations. “Working in the fields is all I know. It’s all my father knew. And his father, too.” 

Kasim was the oldest among five siblings. When he turned 13, his father took him out of school and started taking him to the fields. In the five-odd decades since then, Kasim has earned a name as a harvester but hasn’t earned enough to buy himself a plot to farm on his own.

“I had tried sharecropping for a couple of years,” he mused on one of his breaks from loading bales of lush green, gold-streaked Rabi paddy onto a lorry. “But the rent was too high. Also, tending the land takes a lot of effort. During the cultivation months, when a field worker would be free to do other odd jobs, a sharecropper has to spend the entire day at his plot, fussing around his crops. I could not afford to keep at it.”

Kasim is but one of 11 lakh landless farm labourers in East Bardhaman district, alone. Overall, the agriculture dominated West Bengal economy is backed by 2.92 crore workers. And it is with these workers in mind that the Trinamool Congress state government announced “Bhumihin Krishak Bandhu”, a new direct cash transfer scheme benefitting “landless agriculture labourers” during the February 5 session of the state’s annual budget.

This comes in addition to the ongoing seven-year-old “Krishak Bandhu” programme that guarantees income to farmers. While the 2019 scheme guarantees an annual direct benefit worth Rs 4,000-10,000 to farmers over two equal instalments in the Kharif and Rabi seasons, the new one guarantees Rs 4,000 annual income to farm workers in the same pattern.

“As family men who don’t have regular work, Rs 2,000 every season will go a long way,” said Kasim. “For us, at least, we won’t have to worry about rent for a few months.”

Kasim Molla. Photo: Sashwata Saha.

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Kasim’s two oldest sons also work as farm hands and are eligible for the scheme. 

The state started distributing forms for this scheme on February 14. Each district in the state is hosting weekly camps led by the block assistant director of agriculture. Per local government sources, over one lakh applicants have been registered from Bardhaman district alone, over the last few weeks.

Disbursals for Bhumihin started as early as March 10. As per government source estimates, over Rs 200 crore could be disbursed in the first phase alone. 

“The scheme will cover such agriculture workers who are not recorded as sharecroppers and are completely dependent on others’ farm activities for their livelihood as wage earners,” junior minister for land and land reforms, Chandrima Bhattacharya, said while introducing the programme during the budget session, “And, therefore, are not entitled for the Krishak Bandhu scheme.”

The initiative has an enormous scope, covering farm labourers aged between 18 to 60 years old.

But questions hang over its implementation. For one, how will the state verify that those who have registered for the scheme are not otherwise employed in any informal sector? 

Going over the Standard Operating Procedure released by the state government, there seems to be no reasonable explanation as to how the government plans to verify employment. The sign-up form requires workers to submit personal information such as familial and caste background, their Aadhaar card and the linked phone number, voter card, and bank details including a passbook page or a cancelled cheque. It also requires the registrant to submit a self-attested affidavit, declaring that they are a “landless agriculture labourer” and do not have any alternate means of income. 

The document mentions that the assistance will be provided based on the self-attestation signed by the registrant in the sign-up form. 

According to a Bardhaman-based block-level agriculture official who wishes to remain unnamed in this report, “The agriculture department will consider the eligibility criteria for landless agricultural laborers based on their dependence on other people's land for their livelihood.”

“In the affidavit, the registrant must declare that they do not own any cultivable land, that they are not registered as a sharecropper, and that they are completely dependent on someone else’s land for their livelihood,” the official added. “If anyone is found to be fabricating facts in order to become a beneficiary, the government will consider legal actions against them.”

Now, consider the following questions:

There are thousands of farmers with tiny holdings who do not get Krishak Bandhu and in order to make ends meet, they work as labourers in other, larger farms. Will these folks be eligible for the scheme if they apply?

Or, what if a registrant is indeed a landless farm labourer but is also a migrant worker by nature – how will the government sort their applications from the local labourers?

Sanjay Ankur. Photo: Sashwata Saha.

Sanjay Ankur, 28, has worked in the fields of Bardhaman ever since he turned sixteen. A resident of Payradanga, a village in Kolkata’s northern suburbs, Sanjay travels to Bardhaman and Birbhum, every year once at the end of the Kharif and Rabi crop cycles to work in the harvest. When he is not working as a farm hand, Ankur works as a bricklayer in the city.

“Harvest work pays more than sowing or land-tilling and due to the sheer volume of the harvests, villages always need men to cut, transport and process crops,” he said on one of his breaks from the field. “Harvesting is a kind of guaranteed side-income for people like us.”

Even though on paper, he is a “landless agriculture labourer” and is hence eligible for Bhumihin, he has other jobs that, if verified, would put him at risk of legal action. He is also a proud beneficiary of Yuvashree, the state’s unemployment allowance programme that guarantees a monthly stipend of Rs 1,500.

When asked whether he fears getting caught, Sanjay said, “These allowances are my right. The state government is not creating the jobs it had promised on TV during elections, so why shouldn’t I benefit from their schemes? I voted for this!”

A section of the administration believes that verifying the applications of registrants such as Sanjay will be very difficult, bordering on impossible. “Even after collecting other similar government benefits, if someone signs up for this Bhumihin scheme by falsifying facts about themselves, it would be impossible for us to verify,” the Bardhaman-based official quoted earlier, noted.

Till date, the state does not have a common database that lists out all the beneficiaries of all its various cash transfer schemes. Verification would require government employees to manually trawl through the beneficiary lists of each and every such programme and that might take years. 

According to senior agriculture department sources, its officers plan to carry out the verification process for this new venture in tandem with the local panchayat. The village pradhan and his team will tell the officials whether an applicant is, in fact, a landless farm worker who does not have any other means of income.

“At the end of the day, it is a scheme for Trinamool workers by Trinamool,” said Banshidhar Biswas, a farm hand from Galsi in Bardhaman district. Banshidhar used to own a small plot of farmland that made him eligible for the Krishak Bandhu programme. 

“As I was not on good terms with the panchayat, they made it very difficult for me to sign-up for the scheme. It took me years to be considered. Meanwhile, party workers were onboarded within the first year itself”, he alleged.

Biswas sold his plot, last year, and now ekes out a living working in his neighbours’ farms. He is equally pessimistic about registering for the Bhumihin programme, as well.

The Wire travelled to three districts to see the registration of the Bhumihin Krishak Bandhu programme. Interestingly, there was hardly any female presence in the queues. The very few women who were there told The Wire that most of them were here as proxies for the men in their families.

Putul Gain. Photo: Sashwata Saha.

Putul Gain is 55. She is a grandmother from Arambag village in Hooghly district, who works as a labourer dehulling paddy to produce grains of rice in the months following harvest. “My husband does masonry work up north in Delhi and Punjab,” she said, “Sometimes, when he is home, he also works in the fields. The Panchayat people told me that he is eligible for this scheme so I have come to register him.”

When asked if she as a worker was eligible for the scheme, she said, “I am already getting benefits from Lakshmir Bhandar. I don’t know if I am eligible for this one as well.”

Lakshmir Bhandar is another direct benefit transfer scheme by the West Bengal government that provides financial assistance to women heads of households for essential expenses. It has been operational since 2021 and is considered to be one of the state’s most popular policies.

However, it must be noted that the SOP for Bhumihin does not mention any gendered criteria in its definition of a “landless agricultural labourer”. In fact, women are eligible for the erstwhile Krishak Bandhu scheme for landed farmers.

The district head of Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s agriculture labour union, Mizanur Rahman, is a vocal critic of the programme. “If the state government is to go ahead with this newest allowance, it could cost them up to Rs 12,000 crores in just one year alone,” he noted. “I don’t think the state can sustain something so expensive in the long run. It’s all just a gimmick to dazzle rural voters in the run up to the upcoming elections. Even those applying for the scheme know this!”

According to activist Nachiket Udupa of the Mazdoor Kisaan Shakti Sangathan, “Agriculture labour is part-time employment. There’s no stability, no work for more than half the year. Temporary jobs mean low access to credit. So, people will take the money because they need it.”

Per government as well as independent estimates, about 50% of West Bengal’s 2.92 agriculture labourers do not own any farmland.

Farmers work at a dehusking machine in Sriniketan, Bengal. Photo: Sashwata Saha.

The detractors of the programme are dismissive of the actual allowance. “What great benefit does Rs 4,000 a year bring to a farm hand?” Rahman asked. “The state government has entirely shut down the 100-day work initiative. NREGA has still not resumed. Now, they are using these schemes to gloss that over.”

Former Supreme Court advisory and trade union leader Anuradha Talwar noted that schemes such as this end up harming the long-term health of democratic institutions. “Bhumihin Krishak Bandhu is just one of a series of programmes run by the state of West Bengal that diminishes the presence of local level government bodies such as the Panchayat or the municipalities. Most of these DBT initiatives are handled by party workers rather than government representatives. This creates an impression where the people end up conflating the government with the party.”

She is an advocate for turning initiatives such as Krishak Bandhu and Lakshmir Bhandar into rights-based schemes rather than party promises. “Cash transfers can be tangible benefits but they need to be established as rights. Otherwise, the fear remains that maybe voting the ruling party out of power would mean a stop of these facilities.”

Like Rahman, she also questioned the viability of this scheme as compared to MGNREGA. “With NREGA, not only were workers getting paid, but also there was tangible infrastructural development in rural parts that improved the quality of life in general. On the other hand, DBT schemes today just reach the beneficiaries only.”

Farmers in Galsi. Photo: Sashwata Saha.

While the state government has an NREGA replacement scheme called “Mahatma-Shree” which aims to guarantee 50 days of wage employment annually for rural unskilled workers with MGNREGA job cards, farmers and trade unions say that they don’t see any implementation on the ground. The West Bengal government has allocated Rs 2,000 crore for Mahatma-Shree in the 2026-27 financial year budget. Meanwhile, the Union government suspended MGNREGA funds to the state since April 2022 alleging corruption in the implementation of the scheme by the state.

The state government believes that Bhumihin Krishak Bandhu will solve the issues of a “long ignored class of labourers”. “Even during the launch of Krishak Bandhu, the Opposition had started a similar negative narrative. Krishak Bandhu is turning eight soon and is still as strong as ever. This fear mongering from the opposition will not win them votes because farming families are on the Chief Minister’s side,” said Bardhaman district council member Mehboob Mondol.

Bhumihin Krishak Bandhu is the third direct cash allowance scheme started by the TMC government since the beginning of 2026. Both Bhumihin and Yuvashree have started to disburse cash from the second week of March onwards. The state is scheduled to go to polls on April 23.

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