Mushroom subsidy in Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu, VERIFIED 2026-09-13. This is the task's headline question: the Wayback-recovered `MIDH - NHM - AAP 2021-22` extract (see the file's own prior history, kept below for provenance) printed "Empowering women through Small scale Mushroom Production Units @ Rs.1.00 lakh/unit" without ever saying whether that ₹1.00 lakh was the ASSISTANCE or the unit's COST, a genuinely load-bearing ambiguity, since reading it the wrong way doubles a beneficiary's expected entitlement. Three prior passes (and this task's own brief) named a CAG audit report or the state's Demand for Grants as the untried source that would settle it unambiguously.

FOUND: the Demand for Grants companion document itself. Every year the Tamil Nadu "Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department" tables a "Policy Note" alongside Demand No. 5 in the Legislative Assembly, a narrative account of every scheme the Demand funds, department by department. Its Horticulture and Plantation Crops chapter (pp.52-92 of the 2022-2023 edition) covers the SAME scheme, the SAME MIDH-NHM sub-mission, and the SAME women-targeted mushroom component as the AAP extract, one year later, and states in full prose rather than a bare table header:

"To empower women to convert themselves into entrepreneurs, an assistance of Rupees one lakh is being provided for the establishment of small-scale mushroom production units." (Policy Note 2022-2023, printed p.70, section 2.2.2 "Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture - National Horticulture Mission (MIDH-NHM)")

"An assistance of Rupees one lakh" is unambiguous prose, not a column header open to two readings, it settles the question the AAP table could not: ₹1.00 lakh/unit IS the assistance, not the unit's cost. This also independently corroborates the AAP's own arithmetic (Fin = Phy × Rs.1.00 lakh in every district row, closing "TOTAL 100 100.000", a government financial-outlay column that only balances if Fin is itself the outlay/assistance, not a cost norm requiring a further rate applied to it).

Route: found via the Wayback CDX index (the mode that recovered UP, Rajasthan, Assam and others), walking `tnhorticulture.tn.gov.in` for anything filed under `policy_note` or "Policy Note" in its upload paths, a document class no prior pass on this file had tried. The live path 404s today (soft-404 pattern, matching this domain's Mushroom-AAP file); the complete capture was fetched from `web.archive.org` at timestamp 20230809011038, and its `content-length` matches `x-archive-orig-content-length` exactly (6,604,517 bytes both), so this is not one of the truncated captures flagged elsewhere in this project's notes.

Chapter 2's own table of contents ("2. Horticulture and Plantation Crops ... 52-92") confirms section 2.2.2 sits inside the Horticulture and Plantation Crops chapter specifically, not a general-Agriculture chapter merely mentioning horticulture in passing, this is the Horticulture Department's own account of its own scheme, tabled by its own Minister (the cover page names Thiru. M.R.K. Panneerselvam, Hon'ble Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Demand No. 5, Government of Tamil Nadu 2022).

No percentage and no underlying total-project-cost norm is printed anywhere near this sentence (checked the full chapter, pp.52-92), the document states a flat per-unit rupee figure, nothing more, so this is modelled with `basis: 'perUnit'` and the ENTIRE figure as the disbursed amount (`rateByClass: { woman: 100 }`), the same technique this project uses for Himachal Pradesh's flat per-camp training reimbursement, not a claim that "100% of a project cost" is printed, only that the whole perUnit figure is what reaches the beneficiary. The women-only scoping is the document's own wording ("to empower women"), matching the AAP's own "Empowering women through..." header.

CHECKED FOR CURRENCY, not just existence: also fetched the department's most recent Policy Note live, 2025-26 (`tnhorticulture.tn.gov.in/tnhorticulture/site_assets/site-pdfs/ policy_note/agri_e_pn_2025_26.pdf`, HTTP 200, read in full). Its own MIDH-NHM section no longer repeats the "empower women ... Rupees one lakh" sentence; for 2024-25 it instead reports "Two Nos of Mushroom units at an outlay of Rs.0.16 crore are being established", a sharply smaller scale than the AAP's 100 units, and an aggregate outlay figure this project will NOT divide into an implied per-unit rate (the same trap Jharkhand's budget line hit, Jharkhand's) since two units at one shared outlay could split unevenly. This does not unsettle the 2022-23 finding, the document that states the rate, plainly, in prose, still says what it says, but it means the SAME rate is not reconfirmed as still current in 2025-26, so `status` stays 'unknown' rather than 'active', and a future reviewer should check whether the women's small-scale mushroom line survives at all in the current Policy Note before treating ₹1 lakh as todays's live rate for a fresh application.

PRESERVED FOR PROVENANCE (from the pre-verification history of this file): the AAP extract itself, `tnhorticulture.tn.gov.in/uploads/Mushroom Details(2021-22).pdf` (Wayback capture 20230324211748), is a beneficiary list naming ~100 individual women with their villages and mobile numbers. Per the standing instruction on this file, it has deliberately NOT been archived into content/sources/, nothing in this verified record needs it, and copying a hundred people's phone numbers into this repository to support a figure already independently confirmed by a clean, aggregate-only Policy Note would be indefensible. Cited here by Wayback timestamp only, exactly as the prior agent left it.