Rajasthan: 50,000 false farm loan waiver cases of BJP government cancelled

JAIPUR: Nearly 50,000 false farm loan waiver cases in the state have been cancelled by the cooperative department after a thorough probe into the irregularities in the farm loan waive off by the previous BJP government. It is believed that had the money been transferred to the accounts, it would have cost the state exchequer a loss of Rs 125 crore.
State cooperatives minister Udailal Anjana had ordered an enquiry into the irregularities in the farm loan waive off by the previous BJP government. Last year, the former Vasundhara Raje-led government had announced farm loan waivers up to Rs 50,000 for small and marginal farmers in the state cooperative sector. The investigation was ordered following complaints that cooperative bank employees had issued fake farm loans and pocketed crores by waiving them off.
Inder Singh, managing director, cooperative apex bank said, “Nearly 50,000 entries were found to be false in almost all districts. In some cases there were mistakes in calculations, in few others even government employees were included as beneficiaries (who are not supposed to get the benefits of loan waiver). There were some who were not eligible for the coverage and in some cases even the deceased persons were included in loan waiver."
"When we probed all the cases, we found that there were around 50,000 erroneous entries. First, we will cancel all the entries. After that, the ones which are genuine would be given the amount they are entitled to. The old entries would be replaced by the new ones. We are still trying to ascertain as to how many of these are completely fake entries. We are still probing that. Be it a genuine claimant or not, all false entries would be initially cancelled," added Singh.
He further asserted, "The good thing is these cases were caught even before the money could be transferred to their accounts. Not a single paise was transferred to the accounts and the amount was saved as nobody was benefitted.
Government audits were conducted in Dungarpur Banswara, Sawai Madhopur, Churu, Bharatpur, Jhunjhunu, Jalore, Sikar and Kota. "Looking at these discrepancies, we have introduced Aadhar authentication and biometric verification in the present government's loan waiver scheme," said Singh.