Amar Fasal Amar Gari

What is Amar Fasal Amar Gari?

Amar Fasal Amar Gari is a West Bengal scheme that pays a small or marginal farmer a flat Rs 10,000 towards buying a rickshaw van, so that he can take his own produce to market. The Bengali name translates as "my crop, my vehicle", and the vehicle meant is the flat-bed cycle van that is the workhorse of village produce movement across Bengal.

The scheme is one half of a pilot initiative of the Government of West Bengal run through the Agricultural Marketing Department. Its twin, Amar Fasal Amar Gola, subsidises an on-farm storehouse. The two were announced together and are best understood together, because they attack the same weakness from two directions.

The weakness is this: a small farmer who can neither store his crop nor move it has no bargaining position at all. He sells what he has, on the day he harvests it, to the trader who arrives at his field, at the price that trader names. A storehouse gives him control over when he sells. A rickshaw van gives him control over where, and the gap between the farm gate price and the price at the nearest market is often the difference between a season that pays and one that does not.

Rs 10,000 does not buy a rickshaw van outright, and the scheme does not claim it does. It is a subsidy that brings the purchase within reach of a farmer who would otherwise not attempt it.

How much does Amar Fasal Amar Gari pay?

The subsidy is a flat Rs 10,000 for every selected farmer. There is no slab structure and no variation by landholding, unlike its companion Amar Fasal Amar Gola, which pays Rs 5,000, Rs 12,000 or Rs 25,000 depending on the type of storage structure built.

Payment is made directly into the farmer's bank account linked to his Kisan Credit Card. The state has described this direct transfer route as a transparency measure, the money does not pass through a dealer, an intermediary or a village-level agent.

Who is eligible for Amar Fasal Amar Gari?

You can be selected if:

• You are a small or marginal farmer in West Bengal, within the state's roughly 24 lakh small and marginal farming families.
• You hold cultivable land in your own name.
• You intend to use the van to carry your own produce to market.
• You have a bank account, preferably linked to a Kisan Credit Card.

You are not eligible if:

• You hold no recorded cultivable land. Agricultural labourers and sharecroppers without land records cannot apply, because the subsidy is attached to a farmer moving his own crop.
• You are a large landholder outside the small and marginal category.
• You are not a resident farmer of West Bengal.
• You want the van for a hire transport business rather than for your own produce. The scheme is not a self-employment or vehicle-finance programme.
• You have already received the subsidy. It is one-time support for one purchase.

As with its companion scheme, the arithmetic of the pilot matters. Roughly 10,000 farmers were targeted against a population of about 24 lakh small and marginal farmers, so fewer than one in two hundred eligible farmers could be selected. Meeting every criterion does not secure the subsidy.

How to apply for Amar Fasal Amar Gari

1. Visit your block agriculture office and ask whether Amar Fasal Amar Gari selection is open for the current year in your block. Because the scheme ran as a pilot with a fixed target, availability is not continuous.
2. Submit an application with your land record: parcha, khatian or record of right — establishing cultivable land in your own name, along with identity proof and residence proof.
3. Give your bank account details, quoting the account linked to your Kisan Credit Card if you hold one, since that is the channel the subsidy travels through.
4. Allow verification. The block office verifies the landholding and the applicant's small or marginal farmer status before selection.
5. Purchase the rickshaw van once selected, and keep the dealer invoice, which is the evidence of purchase the office will ask for.
6. Receive Rs 10,000 by direct bank transfer into your KCC-linked account.

The district Agricultural Marketing office is the place to go if the block office cannot confirm the scheme's current status.

Why applications fail

• No cultivable land recorded in the applicant's own name. This is the disqualifier that cannot be argued around, and it is the most common one.
• Bank account not seeded or not linked to the Kisan Credit Card, so the transfer fails after sanction.
• Name mismatch across the land record, Aadhaar and bank account.
• Applying for a purpose outside the scheme. A hire vehicle, a motorised vehicle, or a van for someone other than the applicant farmer.
• Block target already exhausted. With a pilot target of around 10,000 farmers statewide, a perfectly valid application can arrive after the block's allocation is spent.

Where to raise a grievance

• The block agriculture office, which receives applications and verifies eligibility.
• The district Agricultural Marketing office.
• The Agricultural Marketing Department, Government of West Bengal.

Applying is free. No agent is authorised to charge a farmer for inclusion in the beneficiary list, and no dealer can require that the van be bought from him as a condition of the subsidy. The money goes to the farmer's account, not to the seller.

A note on current status

Amar Fasal Amar Gari was launched as a pilot alongside Amar Fasal Amar Gola, with a combined target of roughly 10,000 farmers. West Bengal has not published a detailed current-year operational circular for the scheme in the public domain, and the flat Rs 10,000 figure recorded here is the amount published when the scheme was introduced. A farmer should confirm at the block agriculture office that selection is open in the current season before buying a van in the expectation of receiving this subsidy.

How to check your application status

Amar Fasal Amar Gari has never had a public online tracking portal, so there is no application ID or dashboard to log into. Status checking runs through the same offline channel the application itself goes through.

1. Go back to the block agriculture office where you submitted your land record and bank details. Selection decisions for a pilot scheme with a fixed district-wise target are made and recorded at this level, not centrally, so the block office is the only place that can tell you whether your name has cleared verification.
2. Carry your application acknowledgment or receipt number, if the block office gave you one at submission. Without it, staff will need to search by your name and village, which takes longer.
3. Ask specifically what stage you are at: whether your land record and small or marginal farmer status have been verified, whether you have been included in the selected list for the current allocation, or whether the block's target for the year is already exhausted and your application is pending against a future round.
4. If the block office cannot confirm anything, escalate to the district Agricultural Marketing office, which oversees the scheme across all blocks in the district and can confirm whether the pilot allocation is still open.
5. Watch your bank account once you are told you have been selected. Because the subsidy is paid as a direct transfer to the account linked to your Kisan Credit Card, the credit itself is the final confirmation that your application succeeded; there is no separate "sanction letter" the scheme is known to issue.

If you purchased the van after being told you were selected, keep following up until the transfer appears, since payment is released only after purchase and invoice submission are confirmed by the block office, not automatically at the point of selection.