BENGALURU: Karnataka on Thursday began paying out the first instalment of interim input subsidy to farmers hit by this year's monsoon drought, with Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar launching the disbursal at Vidhana Soudha of a Rs 1,250-crore package that puts Rs 2,500 each into the accounts of an estimated 45 lakh to 50 lakh farmers across 226 drought-hit taluks.
Deputy Chief Minister and Revenue Minister G. Parameshwara and Chief Secretary Shalini Rajneesh were present at the programme.
The money is coming from the state's own funds while Karnataka waits on the Centre to act on its Rs 22,400.58-crore drought memorandum. Beneficiaries are being identified from the FRUITS farmer registry and the kharif crop survey, with the money transferred to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts; farmers do not have to apply. Transfers had been scheduled to start on November 2, and Thursday's event was the formal launch of the rollout.
The scheme was announced at the special legislature session on drought on September 24, when 177 taluks had been declared drought-hit; that list has since grown to 226 of the state's 240 taluks.
How bad the season was: Karnataka received 551 mm of rain during the 2026 southwest monsoon against a normal of 852 mm, a 35 per cent deficit and the second-lowest in 70 years. As many as 237 taluks went through three or more consecutive weeks of dry spells, and nearly 11.97 lakh hectares remained unsown against the target. The state puts crop damage at 57.93 lakh hectares and the economic loss at Rs 62,481.88 crore.
What the state wants from the Centre: on November 2, Mr. Parameshwara wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan with a revised memorandum, after the Union Home Ministry's October 26 notification revised SDRF and NDRF norms for 2026-31. The revision raised Karnataka's crop-loss input subsidy requirement from Rs 6,128.70 crore to Rs 7,943.55 crore and the state's total requirement from Rs 20,585.73 crore to Rs 22,400.58 crore.
The revised SDRF rates are Rs 11,000 per hectare for rainfed crops, Rs 22,000 for irrigated crops and Rs 30,000 for perennial crops. Mr. Parameshwara has argued these are far below what farmers actually spend on seed, fertiliser, labour and irrigation. Shivakumar, in a letter to the Prime Minister this week, again sought an appointment for an all-party delegation on the drought and on sugarcane farmers' demands.
Apart from the input subsidy, the state says it has spent Rs 306 crore on drinking water, placed Rs 329 crore with Deputy Commissioners for emergency works and Rs 25 crore for fodder management.
The politics: Leader of the Opposition R. Ashoka has attacked the Rs 2,500 payment as inadequate and dismissed the state's pleas to the Centre as "begging", drawing a sharp rebuttal from Parameshwara, who said farmers were "annadatas, not beggars" and that the demand was a right under the Disaster Management Act. BJP MLAs have also seized on the 17 conditions in the government order, including FRUITS registration, a two-hectare cap and exclusions for lands converted to non-agricultural use, joint holdings and bagair hukum cultivation. Parameshwara has said the 17 points are administrative checks on eligibility and verification, not fresh paperwork for farmers, and that the two-hectare limit caps the area on which compensation is calculated.
Farmer groups had rejected the Rs 2,500 as paltry when it was announced, and on Thursday sugarcane growers pressed a separate demand, holding a 'jail bharo' protest in Belagavi for a Rs 1,000-per-tonne state subsidy.
(With inputs from PTI and media reports)