In pursuit of its objective to provide a direct cash subsidy to farmers for fertilisers, the government is mulling the feasibility of transferring the subsidy in cash to about 2.3 lakh retailers, instead of the fertiliser makers, as a preliminary step.
A task force headed by Nandan Nilekani is working on a model for the proposed direct cash subsidy system for fertilisers, food and fuel, which the government wants to implement from March, 2012.
To transfer the fertiliser subsidy in cash, the task force has proposed in the first stage to set up a software to track the sale of fertiliser till the retail level. The second stage would involve payment of a subsidy to retailers and the third stage would cover farmers with Unique Identification (UID) cards.
