Farm Loan Waiver
Both the BJP and Congress
announced loan waivers for
farmers as the elections
approached in Punjab, Uttar
Pradesh and Rajasthan. After
forming the governments, they
grandiosely initiated schemes of
loan waiver. How these schemes
fared at the ground level? Data
collected from various news
reports revealed that is lot to be
left undone.
Take the case of Punjab. Before
the state assembly elections in Feb
2017, Congress party promised to
waive the farm loan and provide
free electricity. After forming the
government, a farm loan waiver for
small and marginal farmers was
announced to the tune Rs. 2 lakh
which was supposed to benefit 1.02
million farmers and to cost Rs. 95
billion to the exchequer.
By the end of May 2018, the
state government has waived loans
worth Rs.9.9 billion to 2,02,000
farmers - a little over 10 per cent
of the target. The scheme will
remain as a pipe dream. The total
capital expenditure outlay for the
state of Punjab in 2018-19 is
Rs.63.8 billion, while the govern-
ment allocated Rs. 42 billion for
loan waiver. Budget document
shows that the state’s outstanding
debt has stood at staggering
Rs.2.11 million or 40 per cent of
SGDP. This situation leaves very
little money in the budget to finance
the loan waiver scheme.
In the case of Up, Yogi
Adityanath’s government had
announced in June 2017 a loan
waiver that supposed to benefit 8.6
million farmers costing around
Rs.360 billion. The state govern-
ment allocated Rs.240 billion in
2017018 and Rs.3i.6 billion in
2018-19. The government claims
that it has processed claims of 3.6
16
Promises vs. Performances
million farmers with a cost of
Rs.220 billion. This year another
1.1 million claims that cost Rs,40
billion may be processed. This is
mere processing of half of the
supposed beneficiaries. How much
of it actually paid to beneficiaries
is not known.
What a professor at Lucknow
University throws some light: “the
state government is not able to
process as it does not have the list
of actual beneficiaries and lack of
resources to fund the farm loan
waiver”. (Business Standard, 23-5-
2018).
Rajasthan is the slowest among
the three in processing farm loan
waivers. The BJP government has
to face elections in November
2018. It allocated Rs.20 billion to
loan waiver in the budget 2018-19.
It promised to waive the loans up
to Rs.50,000 for around 2.8 million
farmers. It has yet to prepare the
list of beneficiaries. This waiver is
only for the loan taken from the
cooperative societies. The total
farm credit disbursed in 2016-17
in Rajasthan was Rs 763 billion.
Out of which a fifth was from
cooperative bodies and regional
rural banks.
Close to two thirds of farm
loans were advanced by the
commercial banks which accounts
are not eligible for loan waiver.
In Madhya Pradesh, the
government faced a powerf ul
farmers’ agitation last year. It had
led to killing six farmers in police
firing. The state government
announced a number of sops. The
biggest among them is the payment
of bonus over the centre-fixed
minimum support price, not only for
the coming 2018-17 season, but
also retrospectively for 2017-18
season. This will cost Rs. 16 billion
benefiting 1 million wheat farmers
are the rate of Rs.200 per quintal.
In
Chhattisgarh
too,
the
government announced a bonus of
Rs.300 per quintal for the paddy.
Everyone talks about rural
distress and agrarian crisis. But no
one goes deep into the root cause
this crisis, which was the result
neoliberal policies being pursued
by the successive governments.
This crisis is getting expressed in
the form of debt trap. Instead of
changing these policies, which
made the cultivation unsustainable
for the peasants, the ruling class
parties are doling out sops in the
name ameliorating the crisis.
These sops, as the past experience
proved, has not abated the crisis,
but continued it.
The ruling classes in the service
of imperialism is determined to
dispossess the peasants of their
land by using economic levers and
are doling out sops to dampen the
wrath of peasantry. This is aimed
at turning the Indian agriculture into
an appendage to the imperialist
monopoly capital.
This wanton pauparisation of the
peasantry by the ruling classes
should be fought relentlessly not
only for the sake of peasants but
to save the agriculture and the
country as a whole from the
imperialist domination and
expropriation.
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