Mumbai: Still struggling to meet commitments made to the agricultural sector under the farm loan waiver scheme, the Maharashtra government has now decided to waive outstanding loans of individual eligible farmers. Till now, the State government has spent ₹14,000 crore on the scheme.
On Friday, the State government issued a Government Resolution (GR) on loan waivers to eligible farmers. The decision had been announced by the government the recently-concluded monsoon session of the State Legislature in Nagpur.
Prior to changing its definition of an eligible farmer, the government had considered a farmer family as a single unit and up to ₹1.50 lakh of agricultural debt was waived. Now, each individual with an outstanding agricultural loan will be covered in the scheme, and up to ₹1.5 lakh will be waived by the government. “Each individual’s loan amount up to ₹1.50 lakh will be waived. The necessary instructions have been given to banks to prepare the list of potential beneficiaries,” an official from the State Cooperation Department said.
Earlier, under the scheme, if a farmer had an outstanding loan amount of more than ₹1.5 lakh, the difference will have to be paid to the bank before he or she can avail of the State government waiver. The revised rule also states that farmers who have paid some money to the bank as per the earlier version of the scheme will be reimbursed if the cumulative outstanding loan amount is less than ₹1.5 lakh.
The GR states: “For instance, as per earlier loan waiver scheme, if a family was having cumulative outstanding loan amount of ₹2 lakh, and to avail the benefits, ₹50,000 is already paid by the family, so the State would bear the burden of ₹1.5 lakh; as per revised norms, the ₹50,000 will have to be returned to the family because everyone in the family is entitled to loan waivers.”
In March this year, the government said it has paid for bad farm loans worth ₹13,500 crore to banks, which benefited 35.32 lakh farmers. The government plans to cover at least 77 lakh farmers under the scheme.