Suvvampudi Nageswarao, a farmer from Mycharlapelam village in Andhra Pradesh, had been receiving payments under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) regularly until they stopped without warning. In July 2024, he completed the mandatory electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) process through the government’s facial authentication app. Still, soon after, his status reverted to ‘eKYC not done’, forcing him to travel to a distant Common Service Centre. Even after completing biometric verification again, his application remained unresolved and was eventually marked ‘ineligible’.His case is not isolated. Nageswarao is just one farmer among lakhs others who face the same problem: failure of eKYC for one reason or another, leading to stalled payments.Another farmer, Vanthala Ramesh from Odisha, went through a similarly bewildering experience. One system entry showed his eKYC as completed, while another incorrectly recorded ‘no eKYC done’. The conflicting digital records led to withheld payments and repeated visits to local officials who could not explain or resolve the discrepancy.These experiences reflect deeper problems in the implementation of eKYC under PM-KISAN – problems that reveal how mandatory digital verification has turned verification into a recurring point of exclusion rather than a safeguard against fraud.According to data obtained through the Right to Information Act, eKYC was made compulsory from the fifteenth instalment onwards. As of July 11, 2025, more than 48 lakh farmers out of the 10.64 crore registered PM-KISAN beneficiaries had not completed their eKYC, resulting in their payments – Rs 6,000 per year, paid in three instalments – being withheld. This is a significant number, amounting to 5% of the total beneficiaries, approximating the population in 2011 of major Indian cities such as Surat, Kolkata or Chennai.Also read: Exclusive: 30% of PM Kisan Funding to Go Unspent as Centre Doesn’t Know How Many Farmers India HasAnd the scale of exclusion is likely understated. Among the 1.12 crore farmers currently marked as ‘ineligible’ to receive PM-KISAN benefits, many appear to be genuine entitlement holders wrongly categorised due to administrative and capacity constraints at the local level.A field investigation by these authors of 300 Adivasi farmers in Andhra Pradesh marked ineligible found that around 40% were, in fact, eligible under scheme norms. Grassroot-level officials, under pressure to meet verification targets and lacking adequate institutional support to tackle errors or failures of the system, often resorted to marking unresolved cases as ineligible rather than addressing the underlying eKYC failures.Scheme undermined by digital hurdlesSince its launch in 2019, PM-KISAN has transferred over Rs 3.68 lakh crore to more than 9.8 crore landholding farmer families, as of the nineteenth instalment released in February 2025. The scheme is supposed to credit the Rs 6,000 directly into Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts of eligible farmers.In 2022, the government introduced mandatory eKYC requirements to ensure that payments reached genuine farmers. On paper, this shift promised greater transparency and fraud prevention. In practice, it has often produced the opposite outcome.Farmers are required to complete eKYC through one of three methods: OTP-based Aadhaar authentication, biometric authentication at Common Service Centres or facial recognition using a mobile application. Each of these modes presents serious barriers.Many farmers do not have Aadhaar-linked mobile numbers, making OTP-based authentication unusable. Rising mobile recharge costs have led to number deactivation among poorer households, cutting farmers off from SMS alerts and authentication codes. Biometric authentication requires travel to distant centres, imposing transport costs and wage losses. Elderly farmers and manual labourers frequently face fingerprint mismatches due to worn fingerprints, while malfunctioning devices and understaffed centres further compound delays.The facial recognition application, introduced as a fallback mechanism, has proven unreliable in field conditions. Farmers report frequent app crashes, failed uploads and statuses reverting to ‘eKYC not done’. Poor lighting, low-end smartphones and weathered facial features further reduce success rates.The UIDAI’s 2024 Face Authentication Playbook presents facial authentication as a potentially more inclusive solution, particularly for elderly persons and manual labourers with worn fingerprints. It also states that PM-KISAN entitlement holders can authenticate themselves remotely without visiting service centres. Field evidence, however, suggests that these benefits remain largely unrealised, revealing a clear gap between policy design and on-ground implementation that farmers are forced to bear.Systemic failures behind technologyTechnological barriers are compounded by institutional weaknesses. While state and Union Territory governments upload farmer data to the central PM-KISAN portal, district- and block-level capacity constraints have created significant bottlenecks.Interviews with local officials across multiple states point to recurring problems: inadequate staffing, poor infrastructure, unclear protocols, frequent portal glitches and weak coordination between state and central authorities. The outcome is widespread misclassification. Farmers are often marked ineligible without explanation and frequently learn about payment stoppages only after making enquiries. Once excluded, they are forced into a bureaucratic maze with no clear or time-bound resolution mechanism.From administrative delay to constitutional concernFailures in authentication and withheld PM-KISAN payment are not merely technical or bureaucratic hurdles. They raise serious constitutional concerns. Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life with dignity. The denial of welfare support due to avoidable digital or procedural barriers has direct implications for this right. For a scheme framed as income support during sustained agrarian distress, such exclusions have especially serious consequences.Also read: Navigating PM-KISAN: A Deep Dive into Digital Challenges Faced by FarmersThe Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that access to welfare schemes is integral to living with dignity and that when the state mandates digital systems, it carries a corresponding obligation to ensure their accessibility and reliability. By making digital verification compulsory while failing to ensure inclusive and accountable systems, the burden of administrative failure is effectively shifted onto farmers themselves.Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra versus eKYC failuresIn late 2023, the government launched the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra, deploying over five lakh Common Service Centres and Village-Level Nodal Officers to facilitate eKYC and other formalities. The initiative was presented as a corrective response to mounting exclusions by taking verification services closer to farmers.Field evidence suggests that these efforts have had limited impact. Staff shortages, unresolved technical glitches, inconsistent portal behaviour and weak coordination persist. In many cases, verification attempts made during these drives did not result in lasting correction, with records reverting to ‘eKYC not done’ or remaining unresolved for months.From the eighteenth instalment onwards, PM-KISAN payments have been explicitly withheld from farmers whose eKYC remains unverified, regardless of whether the failure arose from system errors, biometric mismatches or administrative lapses. Therefore, exclusion now operates automatically and at scale, even as corrective initiatives continue in parallel.Verification redefines accessWhat emerges from the experience of eKYC in PM-KISAN is not only a series of technical failures, but a shift in how access to welfare is being organised. Verification has shifted from a one-time requirement to a continuing condition, making exclusion a recurring and largely accepted outcome.Mandatory digital verification places the burden of system failure on entitlement holders. Payments stop first, while explanation and correction remain uncertain and delayed. Community-based accountability mechanisms such as Gram Sabha scrutiny and social audits, originally envisaged as safeguards within PM-KISAN, have been progressively sidelined as eligibility decisions are routed through centralised digital systems.PM-KISAN is not merely a cash transfer scheme. It is a public commitment to farmers at a time of sustained agrarian distress. When access to that commitment becomes conditional on repeatedly clearing digital verification, and when well-documented failures persist despite corrective efforts, welfare risks being transformed from a right into a contingent privilege. That is the larger concern that eKYC in PM-KISAN ultimately brings into focus.B.D.S. Kishore and Chakradhar Buddha are affiliated with LibTech India. LibTech India is a centre in Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD). The views expressed are personal.