PIB TrackerThe 100 PMDDKY districts went from 18.85 to 46.89 in four months
The agriculture scheme completes a year on 11 October. Its dashboard shows the average score across six objectives up 28 points since April, irrigation lowest, governance highest.
What happened
- PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana completes its first year on 11 October 2026; it was approved on 16 July 2025 for six years and launched on 11 October 2025.
- The average score of the 100 districts across six objectives rose from 18.85 in April 2026 to 46.89 in August 2026, a gain of 28.04 points.
- Objective-wise in August: governance 12.05, diversification 10.18, productivity 8.08, credit 6.53, storage 5.19, irrigation 4.91.
- Progress is tracked on 121 indicators across 36 schemes - 74 output and 47 outcome - with monthly rankings on output indicators through the PM-DDKY dashboard.
- All 100 districts have prepared District Action Plans, and the Department of Public Enterprises has directed CPSEs to adopt these districts for CSR in 2026-27 and 2027-28.
For Prelims
- The scheme: announced in the 2025-26 Budget, approved by the Cabinet on 16 July 2025 with an annual outlay of Rs 24,000 crore for six years from 2025-26, and launched on 11 October 2025.
- District selection: three indicators - low productivity, low cropping intensity and low agricultural credit disbursement - with at least one district from every State, which is why the list is national rather than concentrated in the poorest regions.
- Cropping intensity: gross cropped area divided by net sown area, expressed as a percentage. A second crop on the same land raises it above 100, so it measures how hard the land works rather than how much land there is - and it moves with irrigation.
- Convergence: the scheme funds nothing new. 36 existing central schemes across 11 ministries are pointed at one district plan, which is why the test of such a scheme is coordination rather than money.
- Output against outcome: an output is what the administration did - machines supplied, demonstrations held; an outcome is what changed - yield, income, area irrigated. Output moves in months, outcome in seasons.
- Aspirational Districts Programme: the 2018 precedent, where 112 districts were ranked monthly on a composite index by NITI Aayog. The delta-ranking method - scoring improvement rather than level - is what this scheme reuses.
- FPO: a Farmer Producer Organisation, a producer company of farmer members that aggregates produce and buys inputs at scale. The backgrounder’s examples are FPOs with 750 to 1,236 members and turnovers of Rs 1.24 to 1.60 crore.
- Who runs it: District Samiti under the Collector, State Samiti under the Chief Secretary, National Executive Committee under the Union Agriculture Minister, and a National Monitoring Committee under the Secretary, DA&FW.
For UPSC: The clearest published progress report on the government’s flagship agricultural scheme, with an index, its components and a year of movement. Deploy it on agriculture and productivity, on convergence as a delivery model, on district-level administration and the Collector’s role, and as a worked example of the difference between output and outcome indicators in any governance answer.
What it is NOT: No expenditure figure appears anywhere - not what the 100 districts spent, not what any of the 36 converged schemes released into them, so a year of a Rs 24,000 crore-a-year scheme is reported without a rupee. No district-wise scores and no names of leaders or laggards, though the dashboard ranks them monthly. No outcome-indicator results, only the fact that the data was submitted. The scale of the score is never stated, so 46.89 cannot be read as a percentage of anything. And no baseline on the three selection indicators, which is the comparison that would show whether productivity, cropping intensity or credit has actually moved.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.4 · GS2.10 · Linkage L1
Anchor
PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana completes a year on 11 October. Its own dashboard reports the average score of the 100 districts across six objectives rising from 18.85 in April 2026 to 46.89 in August 2026, a gain of 28.04 points in four months.
Substantiation (data)
The six objective scores sum to the total, so they can be read directly. In August: governance and service delivery 12.05, crop diversification 10.18, productivity 8.08, credit 6.53, post-harvest storage 5.19 and irrigation 4.91. Governance started highest at 7.41 in April and remains highest; irrigation started lowest at 1.38 and remains lowest. Productivity grew the most in multiple terms, from 1.50 to 8.08.
Position
The ordering is exactly what a convergence scheme should produce in year one. Governance and service delivery move first because they are administrative - committees constituted, plans prepared, data submitted. Irrigation and storage move last because they are capital works with tendering, land and construction behind them. A score that rises 28 points in four months is therefore reporting the speed of paperwork more than the speed of agriculture, and that is not a criticism of the scheme so much as a caution about what the index can show this early.
Counterpoint
The design point is sharper than the scores. Of the 121 indicators, 74 are output and 47 outcome, and the monthly ranking that drives competition between districts is computed on the output set alone; outcome data has been submitted once, for 2025-26. A district collector optimising for the monthly table is therefore optimising for activity. The fix is built in - the outcome indicators already exist - and amounts to publishing them.
Way forward
Three things would make year two legible: district-wise scores rather than an average, the first outcome-indicator results set against the three selection criteria, and an expenditure figure for what the 36 converged schemes actually released into these districts. Watch also whether the CPSE adoption directive produces named partners, since corporate social responsibility money is the one new resource the scheme brings.
Conclusion
A year in, the scheme has built the machinery the model needs - plans in all 100 districts, committees at three levels, monthly data. What it has not yet published is anything that would show a farmer is better off.
Deploys into: Agricultural productivity and district planning · Convergence as a delivery model · Output against outcome indicators · Aspirational districts and delta ranking
PIB Backgrounder (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare) · 2026-10-10 · PRID 2321731 · PIB source ↗