Just a week back, Naurang Dondiyar, a marginal farmer with one-hectare farmland in Dhikaria village of the tribal district of Banswara, was terribly worried about the repayment of his outstanding loan of Rs 53,778 due to the Central Cooperative Bank.
To add to his misery, he had no money to till the land and get it ready for the upcoming sowing season. Little did he know that it won’t be his crops, but the loans that would wither away in a windfall that he would share with 29 lakh other farmers across Rajasthan.
Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje launched her much-awaited loan waiver scheme from Banswara this week.
The ambitious scheme aims to rid 29 lakh farmers like Naurang, many of them marginal who own less than 2 hectares of land, of a seizable portion of their debt burden. The proposed scheme is on a scale so high that it surpasses the much publicized and game-changing loan waiver programme by then finance minister P Chidambaram which is touted to have got the UPA its second consecutive stint at the Centre.
The loan waiver, even when adjusted for inflation, accounts for more than a 700 per cent jump in the size of disbursal the state government is planning, to shell out for farmers, in a move similar to what was done by the UPA-I government in 2008.
The scheme launched by Rajasthan government has much wider impact zone in terms of head count of farmers who are going to reap its benefits and the fiscal allocation towards the same.
Consider this: The state government’s scheme is set to benefit more than 29 lakh farmers. The UPA-I scheme benefited 8 lakh farmers in state. The amount disbursed by the Centre towards waiver of loans was Rs 1,345 crore, while outstanding loans of Rs 8,500 are proposed to be waived off under the state government’s programme. In a year that will see the state go to polls, the Raje government is looking to firmly plant itself in the state for a second stint with this ambitious waiver scheme. A similar scheme was introduced by the Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra earlier this year.
“The scheme is unique in the sense that it not only waives off the outstanding debt of a farmer, but also makes the same farmer eligible for a loan amount similar to the one that has been paid off,” a senior official who is overseeing the execution of the scheme told DNA.
The maximum waiver allowed per beneficiary is Rs 50,000. So, if a farmer gets a waiver of Rs 50,000, he instantly becomes eligible to get a loan equivalent to the amount of waiver. “The government is not asking a farmer to go for loan. But if the farmer needs money, he can secure a further loan or he can go home with a clean slate,” the official added, saying, “The amount does not include the interest accumulated on the principal, which is also being repaid by the state.”
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