Over 8.8 lakh Uttarakhand farmers woke up to a direct cash transfer on Friday, 30 October 2026 — and Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami was on stage in Dehradun to witness it happen in real time. At the state-level PM Kisan Utsav Divas event, Dhami addressed farmers as the 24th installment of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme landed simultaneously in accounts across the country.

₹18,690 Crore Released Nationwide in a Single Click

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, joining virtually from a parallel event in Gujarat, triggered the transfer of ₹18,690 crore to the accounts of 9.34 crore-plus farmers across India through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). CM Dhami and the Dehradun audience tuned in to Modi's address via virtual link-up — a format the central government has used consistently to give the nationwide rollout a simultaneous, unified feel.

Of that national pool, ₹161 crore flowed directly into Uttarakhand. The state's 8.8 lakh-plus beneficiary farmers received their share under the scheme's fixed rhythm of ₹6,000 per year disbursed in three equal tranches — no middleman, no delay.

PM-KISAN's Seven-Year Arc and the 24th Tranche

PM-KISAN was launched in February 2019 as a central sector scheme designed to deliver direct income support to eligible landholding farm families. The DBT architecture was the centrepiece of its design — a mechanism built explicitly to cut leakage and ensure every rupee reaches the intended account.

Reaching a 24th installment marks more than a calendar milestone. It signals that the administrative pipeline — registration, verification, bank linkage — has held together for over seven years and across hundreds of millions of individual transactions. For a scheme this scale, that continuity is itself a policy outcome.

Dhami's Address to Uttarakhand's Farm Families

Speaking at the Dehradun event, Dhami described the assembled gathering as 'देवतुल्य जनता' ('godlike people') — the kind of register that signals a politician treating a welfare delivery moment as a cultural compact, not just a logistics exercise. He underlined the state-specific numbers, making clear that Uttarakhand's hill farmers — many of them smallholders on fragmented terrain — are counted within the national tally.

With agriculture in Uttarakhand shaped by small landholdings, difficult terrain, and limited market access, direct cash support carries a disproportionate weight compared to larger agrarian states. The ₹161 crore figure, modest against the national total, represents a meaningful floor of income certainty for over eight lakh households.

The next PM-KISAN installment — and whether Uttarakhand's registered beneficiary count grows further — will be the marker worth watching.