The tremors of P Chidambaram’s Rs60,000-crore loan waiver to farmers are being felt in a small village in Haryana.
PEHOWA (Haryana): The tremors of P Chidambaram’s Rs60,000-crore loan waiver to farmers are being felt in a small village in Haryana.
Six days ago, Pehowa was shaken by the news that a village moneylender had committed suicide along with eight members of his family because farmers were not paying back their loans.
On March 16, Mamchand Singhla packed his family, including three young girls, in a vehicle and drove into the Bhakra canal that flows near the village. Last Saturday, police found the nine decomposing bodies 40 km upstream at Karnal and informed the villagers.
In his suicide note, the 60-year-old Singhla wrote that the farmers, by not paying up, had made it impossible for him to clear his own debts.
Along with the note, Singhla also left scribbled on the walls of his house the names of the 21 farmers who owed him money.
“The farmers who refused to pay Singhla took encouragement from Chidambaram’s announcement. Together, the borrowers owed Singhla as much as Rs2 crore,” said Avtaar Singh, the SHO of Pehowa, which is 150 km from Delhi.
Pehowa is sharply divided between farmers and moneylenders, with a history of class struggle. The announcement of the loan waiver by the finance minister marks a new phase in this struggle, with the balance of power shifting to the farmers. Singhla is the first victim in the latest phase.
Villagers told DNA that farmers refused to repay Singhla and his two sons after Chidambaram’s budget announcement of the government loan waiver.
“The farmers think Chidambaram’s Rs 60,000-crore waiver covers every debt. They think they don’t have to pay back either the banks or us,” said Premchand, a moneylender. “I am not going to lend money to farmers anymore.”
Officials at banks in Kurukshetra, where Pehowa lies, say that the banks have now stopped giving loans to farmers. The banks lent money under the heads of securitization (loans against future return commitments) and warehousing (loans against food grain stocks). “Both these financial services have now been withdrawn,” a banker at the ICICI branch in Pehowa said.
Incidentally, Singhla mentioned the bank in his suicide note as one of the institutions that did not bail him out when he needed them the most.
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