58,39,350 apply for state’s farm loan waiver scheme

Nagpur: The state government has received 58,39,350 applications for its loan waiver scheme. The last date to apply for loan waiver ended on Friday.

Government sources said the numbers are nearly at par with what was estimated.

State finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said the government will have to raise funds from borrowings to the tune of Rs20,000 crore to meet the financial outgo on account of waiver.

Of the estimated expenditure of over Rs34,000 crore on the waiver scheme, Mungantiwar said it is expected that not more than Rs20,000 crore will be raised as public debt. It will have no impact on the state's risk rating, he said.

The scheme, apart from waiving overdue loans till Rs1.5 lakh, has a component of cash prize up to Rs25,000 for those who have made timely repayment. With this, it was expected that all the farmers, no matter defaulters or not, would apply. There are 89 lakh farmers' loans accounts of which 44 lakh accounts are default cases. At present, there is no break-up of applications made for waiver and cash prize.

State minister for cooperatives Subhash Deshmukh told TOI, "Now, the data will be matched with the banks' records. Even the government machinery will confirm each case through physical verification at the village level.

"Chowdi action, as it is called in the rural parlance, will be taken up at villages to ensure that only genuine farmers get the benefit," the minister said.

He hoped that the process of crediting waiver amount in respective accounts will be completed by Diwali. Farmers will be able to get fresh loans for the Rabi crop, which is harvested in March.

The government received 1.05 crore registrations at the Aaple Sarkar portal, where the applications are made. A user id and password is created after registrations. An application is made thereafter.

The registrations have translated into over 58.35 lakh final applications for waiver or prize money, as the case may be.

Applications denote the number of families to be covered under the waiver scheme. The registrations are higher because same farmers may have logged on from different centres, or probably more than one member of a single family has registered for the sake of convenience.

The family of husband, wife and children below 18 years of age are taken as one unit. A single application will be taken for each family, said a senior official in the state department of cooperatives, which is handling the waiver scheme.

Even if there are loans taken by both husband and wife, an amount not more than Rs1.5 lakh will be waived per family.

According to the data provided by banks, there are 89 lakh loan accounts, which may amount to 80 lakh individual borrowers. It is estimated that 58 lakh applications would come to over 70 lakh individual borrowers.

Though there is only a single loan from each family normally, it is expected that there may be some cases of both husband and wife being borrowers. This can take the figure to 70 lakh individual borrowers, the official said.

On the farmers left out, the cooperatives minister said they may be those who would be ineligible for the scheme. "There may be farmers who have voluntarily opted to not avail the scheme too, like people who gave up the gas subsidy. Many who have applied would also be filtered out after scrutiny," he added.